/lit/ - Literature

1/4

>Speculation - the withdrawal of profits from the home industries, the increasingly feverish search, not so much for new markets (those are also saturated) as for the new kind of profits available in financial transactions themselves and as such-is the way in which capitalism now reacts to and compensates for the closing of its productive moment. Capital itself becomes free-floating. It separates from the concrete context of its productive geography. Money becomes in a second sense and to a second degree abstract (it always was abstract in the first and basic sense), as though somehow in the national moment money still had a content. It was cotton money, or wheat money, textile money, railroad money, and the like. Now, like the butterfly stirring within the chrysalis, it separates itself from that concrete breeding ground and prepares to take flight. We know today only too well (but Arrighi shows us that this contemporary knowledge of ours only replicates the bitter experience of the dead, of disemployed workers in the older moments of capitalism, of local merchants and dying cities as well) that the term is literal. We know that there exists such a thing as capital flight: the disinvestment, the pondered or hasty moving on to the greener pastures of higher rates of investment return and cheaper labor.

>This free-floating capital, in its frantic search for more profitable investments (a process prophetically described for the U.S. as long ago as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital of1966), will begin to live its life in a new context: no longer in the factories and the spaces of extraction and production, but on the floor of the stock market, jostling for more intense profitability. But it won't be as one industry competing with another branch, nor even one productive technology against another more advanced one in the same line of manufacturing, but rather in the form of speculation itself: specters of value, as Derrida might put it, vying against each other in a vast, world wide, disembodied phantasmagoria. This is of course the moment of finance capital as such, and it now becomes clear how, according to Arrighi's extraordinary analysis, finance capital is not only a kind of "highest stage" but the highest and last stage of every moment of capital itself. During its cycles capital exhausts its returns in the new national and international capitalist zone and seeks to die and be reborn in some "higher" incarnation, a vaster and immeasurably more productive one, in which it is fated to live through again the three fundamental stages: its implantation, its productive development, and its financial or speculative final stage.

>>11310421

2/4

>All of which, as I suggested above, might be dramatically heightened, for our own period, by a reminder of the results of the cybernetic "revolution," the intensification of communications technology to the point at which capital transfers today abolish space and time, virtually instantaneously effectuated across national spaces. The results of these lightninglike movements of immense quantities of money around the globe are incalculable, yet already they have clearly produced new kinds of political blockage and also new and unrepresentable symptoms in late-capitalist everyday life For the problem of abstraction-of which this one of finance capital is a part-must also be grasped in its cultural expressions. Real abstractions in an older period-the effects of money and number in the big cities of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, the very phenomena analyzed by Hilferding and culturally diagnosed by Georg Simmel in his pathbreaking essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life"-had as one significant offshoot the emergence of what we call modernism in all the arts. In this sense, modernism faithfully-even “realistically"-reproduced and represented the increasing abstraction and deterritorialization of Lenin's "imperialist stage."

>Today, what is called postmodernity articulates the symptomatology of yet another stage of abstraction, qualitatively and structurally distinct from the previous one, which I have drawn on Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of finance capitalism: the finance capital moment of globalized society, the abstractions brought with it by cybernetic technology (which it is a misnomer to call postindustrial except as a way of distinguishing its dynamic from the older, "productive" moment). Thus any comprehensive new theory of finance capitalism will need to reach out into the expanded realm of cultural production to map its effects; indeed, mass cultural production and consumption itself-at one with globalization and the new information technology-are as profoundly economic as the other productive areas of late capitalism and as fully a part of the latter's generalized commodity system.

>>11310427

3/4

>For it rather implies a new ontological and free-floating state, one in which the content (to revert to Hegelian language) has definitively been suppressed in favor of the form, in which the inherent nature of the product becomes insignificant, a mere marketing pretext, while the goal of production no longer lies in any specific market, any specific set of consumers or social and individual needs, but rather in its transformation into that element which by definition has no context or territory, and indeed no use value as such, namely, money. So it is that in any specific region of production, as Arrighi shows us, there comes a moment in which the logic of capitalism-faced with the saturation of local and even foreign markets-determines an abandonment of that kind of specific production, along with its factories and trained workforce, and, leaving them behind in ruins, takes its flight to other more profitable ventures.

>There is a deterritorialization in which capital shifts to other and more profitable forms of production, often enough in new geographical regions. Then there is the grimmer conjuncture, in which the capital of an entire center or region abandons production altogether in order to seek maximization in nonproductive spaces, which as we have seen are those of speculation, the money market, and finance capital in general. Of course, here the word deterritorialization can celebrate its own kinds of ironies; for one of the privileged forms of speculation today is that of land and city space. The new postmodern informational or global cities (as they have been called) thus result very specifically from the ultimate deterritorialization, that of territory as such-the becoming abstract of land and the earth, the transformation of the very background or context of commodity exchange into a commodity in its own right. Land speculation is therefore one face of a process whose other one lies in the ultimate deterritorialization of globalization itself, where it would be a great mistake to imagine something like the globe as yet a new and larger space replacing the older national or imperial ones. Globalization is rather a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerialization, as messages that pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world.

>>11310430

4/4

>What does all this have to do with finance capital? Modernist abstraction, I believe, is less a function of capital accumulation as such than of money itself in a situation of capital accumulation. Money is here both abstract (making everything equivalent) and empty and uninteresting, since its interest lies outside itself. It is thus incomplete like the modernist images I have been evoking; it directs attention elsewhere, beyond itself, towards what is supposed to complete (and also abolish) it. It knows a semiautonomy, certainly, but not a full autonomy in which it would constitute a language or a dimension in its own right. But that is precisely what finance capital brings into being: a play of monetary entities that need neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does), which supremely, like cyberspace, can live on their own internal metabolisms and circulate without any reference to an older type of content. But so do the narrativized image fragments of a stereotypical postmodern language; they suggest a new cultural realm or dimension that is independent of the former real world, not because as in the modern (or even the romantic) period culture withdrew from that real world into an autonomous space of art, but rather because the real world has already been suffused with culture and colonized by it, so that it has no outside in terms of which it could be found lacking. Stereotypes are never lacking in that sense, and neither is the total flow of the circuits of financial speculation. That each of these also steers unwittingly towards a crash I leave for another essay and another time. — fredric jameson, the culture of finance capital

source:
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/slam/downloads/documents/novel_studies/sem1_2017/2_May_Reading1.pdf

and what do you make of this, op? what do you want to discuss here?

people waste so much time arguing about politics, economy, markets... maybe it's time for them to read kaczynski. Reform is a fantasy. It does not work. Planned economy or free market, everything looks the same in the end. Whichever one is the least efficient gets discarded. Not complicated

>Capatelism is gret freemerkit is gret
>komunism is bad
Yeah. 2% of the population owning 50% of the world's wealth is much better than the government owning it all.

>>11310673
i'm as big a homer for nick land as you will find anywhere on this board, and i find all things acceleration incredibly fascinating, though depressing. but withdrawing from the extreme fringes and going back to a kind of older model of looking at cultural phenomena is like of like a salve on some part of my soul that has become completely gangrenous with accelerationist neurotoxin. i'm discovering that i am ultimately, if reluctantly, a kind of boring middle-of-the-road guy, and maybe that's the best place to be (which is super-lame). understanding postmodern departures from old-school marxism goes a long way towards preventing me from becoming trigged by them, or proposing solutions in terms of the problem, which is really reactivity and mimesis exacerbated by any number of factors: technology, media, cultural developments and so on.

i don't really know what universities or academia is supposed to do anymore, and i sometimes wonder about philosophy itself as we plunge ahead into cybernetics and other things. but then i read some stuff by a less radical writer, like jameson, and remind myself, okay, so, this really isn't as mysterious as all that. critique as jameson does it kind of suggests to me that left intellectuals are kind of bound to social democracy and economic liberalism like a shotgun wedding. extremist forms of postmodernism, or reaction, are cultural aspects of economic phenomena that are only the prisoners flirting with the guards, and vice versa. again, even i am inclined to view acceleration, technology + finance capital, as being the real story today.

that postmodernism is a kind of fatal collaboration with an infernal process that simultaneously condemns and liberates it is fascinating to me, and helps me process better the various things i see on the news and elsewhere, which mostly strike me as being species and sub-species of reaction to a process we really have no control over, even as we produce and reproduce them. i've read arrighi's book also and it's quite good.

so, to answer your question, i guess the answer is, i'm really not sure. but i thought i would share it anyways on the off-chance that other anons found it interesting or wanted to discuss it also. you never know what these things will percolate.

>>11310740
>Whichever one is the least efficient gets discarded. Not complicated
perhaps not, but the question is whether or not these things just repeat themselves infinitely, and what one does (if anything) with that knowledge.

not your blog.