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 conservativeradicalism 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 preexisting 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, alltoo 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 minimalcommunist 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.

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".