Christian Lotz - The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction

The Capitalist Schema

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The hardback edition of this book was previously catalogued by the Library of Congress as follows:

Lotz, Christian, 1970 The capitalist schema : time, money, and the culture of abstraction / Christian Lotz.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. CapitalismPhilosophy. 2. Schematism (Philosophy) I. Title.

HB501.L8745 2014

335.4'12dc23

2014026708

ISBN 978-0-7391-8246-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4985-0462-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-7391-8247-5 (ebook)

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Everything is rational in capitalism, except capitalism itself.
Gilles Deleuze

Above all, first, I would like to thank Corinne Painter, the better side of myself, herself a philosopher, for her patience with my still, after all these years in the US, imperfect English, and her help and corrections, without which this manuscript would not have seen the light of day.

I developed the seed ideas that inform the background of this book during 2011 while I was a DAAD visiting professor at the Brandenburg Technical University of Cottbus in Germany. I would like to thank students who took my graduate seminars on Marxs Capital during summer 2012 at MSU and, at BTU, during summer 2013. Much of what I did not understand before concerning the social form under which everything is framed and regulated became much clearer to me when I was forced to explain to students this and other central philosophical aspects of Marxs later philosophy. Having been heavily influenced by German Idealism and classical Phenomenology, Marx truly revolutionized my intellectual world. Teaching and thinking about Marx free from the lenses of its still distorted reception(s) and reductions was, and still is, important, as his thought is liberating in a world that becomes increasingly self-deceptive. Admittedly, some Marxists will reject my Marx, insofar as I do not pay (for the sake of the main argument) much attention to political questions, or to the concept of class. As such, the analysis presented in this book, as the main reviewer of this book remarked, might overestimate the role of money and capital. I hope though to have made clear that capital can never be absolutely self-related, as it is necessarily tied to labor and human creativity. For the sake of this text, I have bracketed political questions in their entirety, partly because I have no substantive answer to the question of how Marxism could exist again as a political force beyond the boundaries of academia, and what this would exactly entail. As to the question of classes, I believe that this question cannot be addressed without understanding the violence of capitalist dynamics, the topic of which goes far beyond the core question of social schematization, which is the focus of this book.

I also would like to thank the following students for their philosophical enthusiasm and for allowing me to test some of the ideas presented in this book during a weekly study group on Marxs Grundrisse during winter 2011/2012: Michael Brown, Mladjo Ivanovic, Matthew Johnson, Shannon Proctor, Lila Wakeman, and Andrew Woodson. Given the current state of our profession and the ongoing dismantling of critical theoretical work, as well as the increase of positivistic, anti-intellectual and functional pressures on the humanities at US universities, their enthusiasm for philosophy and their critical attitude towards unquestioned assumptions underlying our contemporary world is a rare exception in our current intellectual and academic climate.

Finally, I would like to thank Zu Klampen Verlag for permitting me to use portions of my essay on Adorno that has been published in Zeitschrift fr kritische Theorie (Lotz 2013a, 112-117) in chapter 2; as well as Taylor &Francis for allowing me to use small portions of material previously published in Rethinking Marxism (Lotz 2013b, 188-191 and Lotz 2014c, 130-136). These small text portions are used in chapter 1 and chapter 3.

As to the quotations from Marx and Engels that are used in this book, I decided to refer to the German original, sometimes the Critical edition (MEGA), but almost always the older Collected Works (MEW), as the English translations of Marx and Engels are often very imprecise. Unless otherwise noted, however, the reader can find the translation of these quotations by searching for them online at the Marxist Internet Archive, which is a good online source for the whole Marxist tradition in politics and philosophy. Moreover, as the reader will see, I work with many direct quotes from other authors. Having emerged out of a German academic background and education, I still highly value the precise inclusion of others ideas into academic texts (instead of transforming those into abstract arguments, or abstract title references); and as such, I tried to integrate many voices, from whom I learned much, into the text. It is my hope that this will not be interpreted as empty academic posturing.

[T]he terminus industrial society suggests, to a certain degree, that its a question of the technocratic moment in Marx, which this term would like to show the way out of the world, immediately in itself; as if the essence of society followed the level of the productive forces in lockstep, independent of its social conditions. Its astonishing how rarely the sociological establishment actually considers this, how rarely it is analyzed. The best part, which by no means needs to be the best, is forgotten, namely the totality, or in Hegels words the all-penetrating ether of society. This however is anything but ethereal, but on the contrary an ens realissimum. Insofar as it is abstractly veiled, the fault of its abstraction is not to be blamed on a solipsistic and reality-distant thinking, but on the exchange-relationships, the objective abstractions, which belongs to the social life-process. The power of that abstraction over humanity is far more corporeal than that of any single institution, which silently constitutes itself in advance according to the scheme of things and beats itself into human beings. The powerlessness which the individual experiences in the face of the totality is the most drastic expression of this. (Adorno, GS8, 364)