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

279 Pages·2014·1.46 MB·English

by  Christian Lotz

The Capitalist Schema
The Capitalist Schema
Time, Money, and the
Culture of Abstraction
Christian Lotz
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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. Capitalism–Philosophy. 2. Schematism (Philosophy) I. Title.
HB501.L8745 2014
335.4'12–dc23
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)
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Everything is rational in capitalism, except capitalism itself.
—Gilles Deleuze
List of Abbreviations
CI Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes.
London: Penguin.
CII Marx, Karl. 1993a. Capital, Volume II. Translated by David Fernbach.
London: Penguin.
CIII Marx, Karl. 1993b. Capital, Volume III. Translated by David
Fernbach. London: Penguin.
G Marx, Karl. 1993c. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolous.
London: Penguin.
GS Adorno, Theodor W. 1998. Gesammelte Schriften. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
MEGA Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1972-2013. Gesamtausgabe.
Berlin: Akademie.
MEW Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1952-2013. Werke, 42 volumes.
Berlin: Dietz.
Acknowledgements
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 Marx’s
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 Marx’s 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
Marx’s 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 für 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.

NOTE ON QUOTATIONS
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 other’s
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.
Introduction

[T]he terminus industrial society suggests, to a certain
degree, that it’s 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. It’s 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 Hegel’s 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)

We are at a point in time at which the capitalist world is