an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Global Capital: The Currency of the
Code
The ideology of the market is
unfortunately not some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or
embellishment (of the real) that can be … sent over to some cultural or
superstructural morgue, to be dissected by specialists over there. It is somehow generated by the thing itself…[1]
Is not thought itself, an appendix,
an aberration, a hypertelic excrescence, a luxurious but lethal dysfunction,
which contravenes the whole of evolution by suddenly becoming aware of
it—paralyzed by its own image?[2]
Boundaries have always been made of flesh. It is for that reason that the phantom in the
mechanism has been exorcised. Yet,
something still tracks us, surrounds us (comprises us?) and still persists in
postmodernity, some unknown we cannot define, some variable we cannot solve
for—it is this object that drives theory and reality. We live in a frame of
technical device and we occupy a body of organic substance; we construct texts,
we illustrate a Screen; and we inhabit those fields of immanence conceptually and
operationally—in their totality, they comprise a milieu.
Recently, modernity witnessed the birth of the double
helix (DNA); postmodernity now bears witness as the helix bequeaths its
evolutionary secrets to us all as Code.
We must never confuse the terrain of the Code for its cultural terms—nor
can we any longer selectively ignore the outfitted reality that the Code’s
terms can execute, nor the potential reality its cultural terms can
create. Indeed, our challenge today, is
to recognize the Code, while we manage its effects, many of which are
detrimental to the egalitarian polity many of us desire.
The Code is real—and “we are not far from wolves” in
embodying its material composition.[3] Its effects are manifest as a strategy of
deception and withholding, sequestration and discharge. To survey historical modernity and even
further back in time still, is to witness “capital accumulation over and over
again across the space-time of the capitalist world economy.”[4] We have only recently begun to call our
bluff, which is to say, we have begun to coexist on familiar terms with Capital
as the Code (and the Code as Capital); and are surprised to learn that it has
conserved and replicated itself since the Beginning.
We have long been becoming-Capital—and we have always
been Code. There is nothing at all to
speak of, in the absence of its currency.
Watson writes:
Above all, the human genome
contains the key to our humanity. The
freshly fertilized egg of a human and that of a chimpanzee are, superficially
at least, indistinguishable, but one contains the human genome and the other
the chimp genome. In each, it is the DNA
that oversees the extraordinary transformation from a relatively simple single
cell to the stunningly complex adult of the species, comprised, in the human
instance, of 100 trillion cells. But
only the chimp genome can make a chimp, and only the human genome a human. The human genome is the great set of assembly
instructions that governs the development of every one of us. Human nature itself is inscribed in that
book.[5]
Of course, the Code only provides the instructions
for the biomachine, which in many aspects of its embodiment, becomes a
recording device of sorts, and that is how a child born of any particular color
in the world, raised in another location, will adopt the operational practices
to a large extent, of the location it inhabits, and we do this even as
adults. Hence the recording of a foreign
accenture upon one’s extant verbiage, manifest just by simply spending time in
another language milieu for a period of time.
The point here is to illustrate that despite the cultural coding of the
machine (a femdamentalist topical favorite), the Code has somewhat of a
hegemony over the technical limits of the machine.
Bioengineering of course, is working to efface all of
that. In that sense, we should dispense
with older versions of concepts of human nature, and instead envisage a dynamic
human inscription process, which can be increasingly associated with the active
writing process of the machine. The
machine is a medium—indeed Biomedia[6]—and
it can be inscribed upon, and this inscription can alter the program that it
runs, and yet, there are certain functions of the machine, we are learning,
that may in general, or at least at present, be immutable. All of this with one caveat: though
immutability for certain parameters may be real at one moment in time, say 2005
AD—this does not mean it will always be the case. Welcome to the desert of the real.
The Code is our substance, our expression and
demonstration—the material manifestation of which is Capital, in all of its
forms and particulars; it is that with which we must contend. Capital is not its only concept (with its
sets of terms) that increasingly envelops the world, but it is the most
material Creator of conditions and stipulations, as in parameters of utility,
and we should understand it as having an ordering dual Basis—that of the
material and that of the metaphysical.
1 Corinthians 6:20: “You were bought with a price,
therefore, honor God with your body…”
Where the basis was once the Father, and then the
Son, and even his Mother, or the Church—those forms of Basis are lost, effaced,
exchanged for a new Basis today. This is
neither lamentation nor advocacy, but rather simply, observation. The envelopment of Capital occurs in every
human sphere—in the total milieu—from cowry shells and yams in the Pacific
Islands to credit swaps and currency markets in London. To this there is no exception—Capital is
effective; its logics are territorial and expansive—and its Logos can take on
any appearance in the world operation of our human temporal embodiment. Paradoxically, it is historical—we do not
exist until it does, and then we come to represent it; that is, we are the
bodies of its work. At the same time, it
is ahistorical—it has no history to speak of, save what we construct through
the reverse-transcription of its past via the discipline of history.
With regard to the evolution of Deity, a trajectory
through human space has been textually rendered for millennia (indeed, almost
since the Beginning[7])
and that chronicle has meandered along the surface of our terrain, crusading
and converting, while also extending the screen of history behind it, as it
stealthed along. Essentially, the
chronicle provided a reference point and shadow from within which we have
slowly been grasping toward another plateau.
The Deific backdrop of the world process makes less and less sense, to
more and more people, as Capital rises everywhere at once, even if Capital is
not here to save, but to slaughter and exclude by the manifestation of its
absence. That is the beauty and the
terror of Capital in our world. In the
most blunt sense, humans are becoming increasingly weary of waiting for the
ancient and pious Salvation they now feel will never come—in the face of
Capital that is already here to greet them.
Many are under the spell of history, which provides
Capital with a birth, a Beginning, but Capital was always present in its basic
form: the Code. We might even say, in
our lighter moments, that Capital is the dream of the Code. Where Culture dreamed of beauty, Capital
yearned to be effective. At last,
Capital learned to effect beauty, so as to assimilate beauty as a veneer.
Today, Capital is beautiful—operationally, and that
is the aesthetic we revere.
The problem with the recognition of Capital’s
enduring omnipresence is that there is no one to indict of the crimes Capital
commits—do we indict ourselves, that is to say, human society? And then, do we
punish ourselves? After all Freud,
already tried to issue such a judgment:
But with the recognition that every civilization
rests on a compulsion to work and a renunciation of instinct and therefore
inevitably provokes opposition from those affected by these demands, it has
become clear that civilization cannot consist principally or solely in wealth
itself and the means of acquiring it and the arrangements for its distribution;
for these things are threatened by the rebelliousness and the destructive mania
of the participants in civilization.[8]
What Freud missed here is that the human instinct is
precisely to work; there is not a renunciation of instinct in that activity,
but rather an embrace of an instinct to survive, to produce, to replicate (and
if not replicate, certainly to copulate—where replication becomes incidental
for most of the species)—that is the Code’s agenda—the Code is as the Code
does. In addition, civilization can
consist of Capital accrual and defense—and it has and does so—increasingly, via
the “world-widing of the world” (i.e. globalization). It is not wealth that most seek, but rather,
production of a life or lives.
Capital makes itself known, among other ways, as a
function and a tool of precisely the “rebelliousness and destructive mania” of
which Freud speaks. Though circumstances
are novel, the inception point of all of this is not contemporary, and we are
merely molecular progeny in perpetual flux. We came into being from the point
at which molecules began to self-organize, conserve—replicate—that is the
beginning of utlitous Code, a manifestation of which today, is Capital; notice
how it too, self-organizes, conserves, accumulates, replicates, etc. It is in that sense, that Capital, and
increasingly today, global Capital, represents and implements the Code, and is
a tool of it. We should note here that
certain factions of Code are more represented by Capital, than Others.
Consider the synthesis of our bodies, always driven
by desire, which is to say, the desire of the minded-body, our Coded
embodiment, is in many events, a machinic process.[9] Beyond the intellectual transcendence of
psychoanalysis, and beneath the rational edifice of philosophical thought,
there is skin and bones, organs and flesh, blood and cellular material; and
driving the system, beneath the organization of these larger macrofigures is
molecular material, proteins, neurotransmitters, biochemical signaling agents,
etc. It is their dialectic discourse with environment—that in general,
categorizes the operation of the Code.
The Code’s beauty is in its ignorance of the discourse it is the focus
of—meaning perhaps, the cell respires, produces, replicates and dies—apart from
our thinking it, and in this sense is universally constant and true.
Where humans, such
as Descartes, only provided proof of thought (Western, of course), proof of
thought did not, necessarily provide proof of purpose. For that, many would choose Deity—which was always
a form of Capital. A form of Capital to
provide certainty, or a Capital to provide meaning, always remains an event of
utility. Enter marriage, an investment
vehicle in the production of the Code as Capital:
The production couple—the
desiring–machines and the social field—gives way to a representative couple of
an entirely different nature: family myth.
Once again, have you ever seen a child at play: how he already populates
the technical social machines with his own desiring-machines, O sexuality—while
the father or mother remains in the background, from whom the child borrows
parts and gears according to his need, and who are there as agents of
transmission, reception, and interception: kindly agents of production or
suspicious agents of anti-production.[10]
In truth, if anything has been born in Capital’s
name, we are only speaking of the birth of its recognition by us. The recognition of its shaping of the World
becomes unavoidable in our era. Of course,
the hoarding began in the cave and on the plain, to the extent that utility
could be carried and defended, extracted, taken away and preserved. Those events served as the basis for the
formation of the structures of Capital, the institutions that would serve to
preserve its dominion. Today, all
edifices become dissolvable, indeed need to be soluble, and become aqueous
through the continuous deterritorialization of globalizing mediated bodies:
And for capital: the deterritorialization of wealth through
monetary abstraction; the decoding of the flows of production through merchant
capital; the decoding of States through financial capital and public debts; the
decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrial
capital; and so on.[11]
Hence the beginnings of the age of “strange
piety.” Out of the old stream—arises a
new flow. The early capitalist diaspora
of the Genoese recognized and responded to the beckoning metaphysical face of
Capital, and usury flourished, while Church cries of moral depravity fell upon
deaf ears; in essence, bankers who broke old rules prospered. The Italians adapted to their circumstances
in as many ways as possible, so as to facilitate Capital’s accumulation, for example,
by outsourcing their security needs to Iberian rulers and focusing on Capital’s
expansion, instead.[12] It is with irony, that some 700 years later,
the Genoese streets would find themselves to be filled with protesters raging
against the very same face of Capital at the G-8 Summit in 2001. Then again, those that spoke directly to
Capital in old Genoa, and had agency through Capital, were most certainly the
minority of people, which is no different, in large measure, from circumstances
today.
When the Dutch superseded the Genoese in the 16-17th
centuries as the capitalists of import, this evolution was characterized by the
Dutch internalization of the military protection costs that the Genoese had
outsourced at a far greater cost than the Dutch, who soon found they could
provide protection for themselves at lesser cost. With greater accumulation of power, the Dutch
regime changed, stepped away from the model of the Italian city-state, and
moved that much closer toward the realm of the nation state.[13] By the time of the height of the British
regime, the United Kingdom “…was a world-encompassing commercial and
territorial empire that gave its ruling groups and its capitalist class a
command over the world’s human and natural resources without parallel or
precedent.”[14] With the birth of the United States, the
world would come to cower beneath the historical formation of even more
powerful governmental-business complexes.
As we can see, historically, and today, Capital and
its methods (as with DNA and its analogs)—evolve. Global Capital—the currency of the
Code—evolves much like a living tool, and as a material metaphysical organism—a
material event. Marx wrote that Capital
was dead labor, but we know now that Capital is immortal currency. Like God, Capital can never be killed,
precisely because it has no singular body—it has instead, multiple
bodies—multiplicities—territories. The metaphysics of Capital, the extensive
utility of all that is effective, in a forward-looking sense, if it is to give
way to anything at all, will only concede to itself, that is, can only give way
to a metaphysics of the Code.
Baudrillard once wrote of the indeterminacy of the metaphysics of the
Code, and he was skeptical (and I would say, still is) of this new event:
Within indefinite reproduction, the system ends its
original myth and all referent values that it secreted in accordance with its
processes. Putting an end to its myth of
origin, the system put an end to its internal contradictions (no longer
confronting the real or its referent)—it put an end also, to the myth of its
own end: the revolution itself…The golden age of the revolution was that of
capital where the myths of origin and the end still circulated…Once it has
short-circuited these myths (and the sole danger that capital has run historically
comes from its mythical demand of rationality that was tied into capital
from its debut) within an operationality, without discourse, it becomes its own
myth, or rather an indeterminate machine, aleatory, something like a genetic
social code—then capital leaves no chance of a determinate reversal. This is a veritable violence. It remains to be seen if this operationality
itself is not a myth, and further, if DNA itself is not a myth.[15]
For Baudrillard, the myth of Capital is linked to the
myth of DNA, perhaps by virtue of the order of the systemic Enlightenment
rationalities they purvey. Such
rationality, in any form, is always of the order of the myth. However, today it would seem that these myths
have not only grown, but evolved; yesterday’s myths, have become today’s
metaphysics; and yesterday’s metaphysics, have become today’s ghosts. Capital and the Code—have become real. Where the myth was always a story, a parable—a
tale; the metaphysical always descends upon us from above, as a system and a
method. We know that the myth is false,
where the metaphysical is something that is real, precisely because it is
believed in.
Important in relation to Capital and the Code in
postmodernity, is Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the becoming-body without organs;
the schizoid-multiplicity traversing a thousand plateaus in real-time,
anticipating and avoiding its destruction by the forces opposed to it, by
becoming the master of a singular, yet collective, and mutiplicitous
subjectivity. Such a state is an ideal,
and a responsive process of being in their thinking. It is a reaction to the rise of Capital and
the Code, and though you can never reach the state of being the Body without
Organs (BwO) in principle, it serves as a new modular ontology for the new
evolved milieu we inhabit.
Deleuze and Guattari:
People ask, So what is this BwO? —But you’re already
on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a
lunatic: desert traveler and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives,
fight—fight and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and
fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. On November 28, 1947, Artaud declares war on
the organs: To be done with the judgment of God, “for you can tie me up
if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ.” Experimentation: not only radiophonic but
also biological and political, incurring censorship and repression. Corpus and Socius, politics and
experimentation. They will not let you
experiment in peace.[16]
In a sense, the BwO is what is left of the
contrivance of humanity after Capital and the Code are through rebutting the
device of psychoanalysis. If
psychoanalysis attempted to reconcile an imagined imbalance of fragmented
mental states and events that were perhaps palpable in modernity, the BwO
rejects that there is anything to put back together again in the first
place—that is:
It is not at all a question of a fragmented,
splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the opposite. There are not organs in the sense of
fragments in relation to a lost unity, nor is there a return to the
undifferentiated in relation to a differentiated totality…The BwO is desire; it
is that which one desires and by which one desires…desire stretches that far:
desiring one’s annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money army, the police and State desire,
fascist desire, even fascism is desire.
It is a problem not of ideology but of pure matter, a phenomenon of
physical, biological, psychic, social, or cosmic matter. [17]
If global Capital writes the world, on the medium of
our flesh that is biomediated Code—our currency, our living being has two
choices—to write, or be written upon. To
write is to become-animal; to merge with boundaries and connections, and embody
the flows of the world. To be written
upon, is to make the mistake of psychoanalysis:
We wish to make a simple point about psychoanalysis:
from the beginning, it has often encountered the question of the becomings-
animal of the human being: in children, who continually undergo becomings of
this kind; in fetishism and in particular masochism, which continually confront
this problem. The least that can be said
is that the psychoanalysts, even Jung, did not understand, or did not want to
understand. They killed becoming-animal,
in the adult as in the child. They saw
nothing. They see the animal as a
representative of drives, or a representation of the parents. They do not see the reality of a
becoming-animal, that is affect in itself, the drive in person, and represents
nothing.[18]
Deleuze and Guattari advocate the dispensing of the
ideology of points of origin, beginnings and ends, to embrace the multiplicity
of new lines of flight—and we should recognize this idea as an effect of the
newly apparent rhizomic activity of the Code spreading across the world—the
effects of which Capital distributes as rhizomic mediator. This development does not put Capital
necessarily at the service of good. In
fact, the hierarchies intrinsic within the world rhizome of the Code are far
too brutally apparent. The rhizomic currency
of the Code should be the object of the organs of political action. A truly political consciousness has in
reality, yet to emerge, or at least, a truly egalitarian model of such an
endeavor.
In order to theorize the currency of the Code, indeed
the currency of the human condition today, we cannot ignore the narrative of global
Capital. It is not a determinist
sequence of events, but rather a part of the foundation for understanding just
what a thinking body can become today; essentially, the newest part of our
story. The embodiment of thought and its
application, increasingly, cannot be understood apart from the matrix it
resides in—hence the temptation, perhaps agreeably so, to focus so closely upon
the reading and writing of texts.
Thought in postmodernity takes its most radical textual shape via
Capital, and is in turn shaped by Capital—in fact is Capital. From ancient Greece to medieval Europe, and
from dynastic Asia to the South American el campo, sequestration and
withholding are the order of the day—in fact, have always been the order of the
day. These are the transparencies of the
texts of Capital.
Critics of the market, or Capital, and the material
effects of the currency of the Code, need to refocus energies, away from
lambasting the observable data (that Capital is globalizing, as a currency of
the Code) with regard to the rampant circulation of the helix.
Jameson writes:
This allows me to express my thesis in its strongest
form, which is that the rhetoric of the market has been a fundamental and
central component of this ideological struggle, this struggle for the
legitimation or delegitimation of left discourse. The surrender to the various forms of market
ideology—on the left, I mean, not to mention everybody else—has been
imperceptible but alarmingly universal…’The market is in human nature’ is the proposition
that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most
crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time. If you let it pass because it seems an
inconsequential admission or, worse yet, because you’ve really come to believe
in it yourself, in your ‘heart of hearts,’ then socialism and Marxism alike
will have effectively become delegitimated, at least for a time.[19]
The problem with Jameson’s
criticism here is that Marxism, socialism, or any other ideology, is not what
is at stake in the recognition of our contemporary quandary. Egalitarian polity is the goal, we presume,
but we cannot say without question, that such and such ideology will achieve
this or that goal. The truth is, we
simply do not know what will work in this situation, one way or another, though
we can and should continue to speculate and experiment vis-à-vis polity. What is clear is that Capital is globalizing,
is becoming metaphysical, is ordering the world increasingly, and it seems to
function as an extension of the Code, that is, Capital is a currency of the
Code. It is also clear that manning the
intellectual bastions against conceptual relationships between the market and
human nature—or the Code and its currencies (e.g. Capital) for a sort of ‘last
stand,’ of Marxism is bound to yield nothing.
Today, a becoming-Capital
emerges to face us, and this becoming will involve the internalization of the
current field of social forces that composes our social system. This becoming will efface what is left of
Deity, and has itself become spiritualized in a supraterrestrial field that
will increasingly overcode, overdetermine, and over-aestheticize the sphere of
the real—reifying the new metaphysical system of Capital: “The infinite debt must become internalized
at the same time as it becomes spiritualized.”[20] This is, in fact, happening.
Cursing the Code, or Capital and its newest metaphysics, or the human
activity that emerges out of these devices, repeatedly—will not produce an
egalitarian polity. We are losing ground
if we approach our milieu from the position of “defender” of this or that
ideology, and quite simply, none of that, in any case, acts to change the
devices in question. Only the
recognition of our situation, in a sort of basic science sense, where we
attempt to gather the data, before passing diagnoses or resolutions, and
certainly before issuing prescriptions, prior to the data analysis, will help
us in the end to facilitate the management of circumstances that now lead us to
realize that we are globalizing mediated bodies of Capital and Code. Therein lie our new kinds and lines of flight
for the development and evolution of egalitarian polity.
an international
and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image