'Fictitious capital', work, art, precarius subjects

              IRHNSFORIKIIIONS
VirliKil fnsaiiity. ihe title oí'tlie 1996 hit
single bv Jainiroquai. nicelv indicales
the períídies of the lerm 'virTuality.'
Either vou are sick, vou preteiid to be
sick or yon are trying lo make yonrself
believe yon are sick. And ihis is
hypochondria, which is 'really sick.' Is
the \ i r t n a l " best undersiood as a vii'lua!
s|3ace, a virtual ca]3italisiii, or a virtual
stale oi inind? If that whicli is 'virtual'
still has anvtiiiiig lo do with that which
is 'possible' or with lliat whic;h is 'to
come," whal does this mean l'or
cyberspace or the internet, which are
alreadv installed?
Since 'virtual can l)e ap|)lied lo a
wide range of |ihenoinena that are
important iii contemporaiy society
(production, sex or space), it lias to be
taken seriousiy. It might seem soniewhat
paradoxical lo connect a 'possible' space
(Uke the sketch oí' a building) and an
actual one (like the aiiimated space of a
movie or the 'room' of an internet-nieeling)
so as to créate somelhing
exisling. Biit this happens. Maybe this is
what promise has become in the
advaiiced market]3laces of consumer
society: somelhing which is yet to come
(after the cornmodily is bouglit),
something which, however, \\all not
come, and is not supposed to come. As
nnich as the pi-oniise of the conmiodity
í'elish, virttialitv aims al a specific
receptability oii behalf oí the 'user.' A
specific consciotisness, mentalitv or
subjectivilv is re(|MÍi-('(l bv both.
Virtiialit\ then. might describe those
pheiioniena which are used to 'mediate'
consuni]3lioii in a techno-culture; it is
something of a 'strange attraclor in the
modeling of impulse, motivatioii, lust
and attraction. Is there 'Virtual Ecstasy?
Mavbe siich experience is lo he. foiind at
a rave event or bv means of a pill. Bul
the thing that serves as 'ecsisisyfier,' tlial
wliich monev is spent on, is not the
'puré techno-rave or the dose of
'Fíctítious
Capital', Work,
Alt, Precarious
Subjects
MDMA/XTC. There is always something
'more, some X around the X's of techno-aesthetics,
svnthelic |)leasure and hybrid
substances. (Jonimodity í'etishism is
¡ii\-olv(!d - along wilh the reified promise
which performs its mental-technicality
(the suggestive sound iterations of techno
miisic and the chemical mind drugs).
Advanced capitalism in general, is a
í'ireworks of packaging and displays, of
distanced and self-critical operalions oí
empty promise, of the fiin of being aware
oí constructions. Putting the promises of
the commoditv under invesligation, does
not im|jly the opijosite: that is, go l'or the
real thing - do battle with animáis or
llave sex, since everyljodx' knows thal
sexuality is no giiarantee l'or happiness or
ecstasy, but can l)e a rather complicaled
issiie. The expressioir'/ia;;e sex' is telling:
there is no esca|>e l'rom fetishisin, even
whiie ijerfoi'niing the 'real.
BuKoiis + Khetoric
Tlie internet, the lalk of tlie towii, is the
virtual in use. To click on the discourse
bullón labeled 'enter
cyberspace/internet,' is to open up a well
known and rather homogeneous set of
beliefs, images, tastes and sentiments.
Cyberspace - Virtual Realitv - is
associated with moveinent, 'Ughtness,' a
strange category of bodily and bodyfree
feelings, vague sentiments of
globalizalion, unlimited access and
ability. It liints at emancipation írom the
restraints of class, tradition and matter,
waxing lyrical abotit 'new democratic
utopias and "new spiritual cilizenships.'
Its adherence to the tradition of the
enlightenment projecl of capitalism is
obvious. The button 'enter cyberspace'
works as a rhetorical figure, organizing
discutirse, destabilizing traditional
structures in economic and social life,
urging companies all over the world to
revamp their enterprises, changing
learning schedules at schools and
universities. This figure is active in
ta(;kling the preset conditions of the ego
and its self-images. It enforces a
transition l'rom the image of ihe human
subject as a rather sociological or
psychoanalytical Ivpe (ihe individual as
having a 'role' in societv or, as an
ensemble of inslincts) lo an image of the
subject whose self-reflexivitv or mirror-reflection
is rather like a pilol,
navigating ihrough the nighl ol the
real/cyberspace, detached from bodily
needs.
lilis rhetorical figure is ideological
in the foremost sense of 'ideology^ as
something that inakes something else
invisible. (A'bers|)ace talk ludes actual
Iransitions in the economic field and in
flie status of the nation stale. Fiin.
consunierism, flexible identities.
voluntarism, technological reasoning,
low-cost progress, access for all and
internationalism are the topics on the
agenda. These are the new cartogra|)hies
of aljandoned zones (detached l'rom
woi'ld trade economies and from data
highway infrastructtires): the precarious
-7^A-
nature of work (enormous
unemployment rates in Europe, new
quick Jobs in the US), and new forms of
computer-assisted euthanasia. The
ideology effect makes this development
appear as a necessary and automatic
process of differentiatíon in the means of
production. The rhetoric hides the
agents of global and national capital, the
agents who have, since the early '70s,
pushed govemments to loosen
restrictions on money and currency.
Therefore, monetary deregulation
became one politicai answer to the crisis
of Fordist production.
Involuntary Actors
To enter cyberspace is therefore a
politicai act - even if you are just
playing. That does not mean that play in
cyberspace should be politicized: it does
mean that the assumptions and alleged
promises which are reproduced in
mainstream and critical discourse have
their serious sides. Ail the internet verbal
amplifiers, that is, press such as Wired,
critics like Mark Dery, or activist
organizations like the 'Next 5 Minutes'
in Amsterdam, are politicai actors.
Notwithstanding their different politicai
positions, they are part of a struggle to
make virtual reality indispensable, either
by means of tautological processes (new
technologies are heralded as the new
paradigm, because they say they are) or
just as self-fulfilling prophecy. Certain
segments of the art world were, if not
decisively avant-garde, still sufficiently
ahead of the public in discovering cyber
technology as a 'new' aesthetic paradigm
in which to reestablish the myth of the
avant-garde, in its techno-cultural
manifestation. Artists and curators
became active in the most diverse levéis
of cultural production. Peter Weibel's
arts and science shows in Linz ('Ars
Electrónica'') and Jeffrey Deitch's
exhibition 'Posthuman,' are prominent
examples. These exhibitions are
sometimes incredibly naive, like Weibel's
"^Genetiscfie Kunst - Künstliches Leben "
("Genetic Art - Artificial Life") in 1993,
which gave genetic engineering total
credit for being able to solve every
remaining problem on earth. In other
instances, such shows have been
impertínent, as in the case of Deitch,
who subsumes all the emancipatory
forcé of discussions on gender and race
under the project of the New
Technologies, as if 'Act Up' were the
same as the techno-medical apparatus,
the whole lot all fighting the same
enemy. And with this figure of ONE
enemy, a social phenomenon - the AIDS
crisis, as activists named it - has been
reduced to a coding/recoding killer-virus.
Art projects such as Orlan's
techno-surgical 'self-reconstruction' or
Stelarc's absurd techno-extensions, add
an aesthetic surplus to technological
progress. These projects are based on the
premise that bio-technology makes the
total construction of reality (including
differences of gender and race) de facto
and materially possible and tnie. This
discourse is ridiculously void of any
insight into the real state of medical
arts. As astonishing as cloned animáis
might be, they are effects of trial and
error experiments and not the result of
an easy 'steering' of Ufe. The discourse
of bio-technologicfJ emancipation is
furthermore naive in not realizing the
stigmatizing character of techno-determinism:
the allegedly 'bad' gene is
no better a stigma than the color of skin
or eyes. Bio-technics (in the mainframe
of a computer-aided conception of the
world - of the gene-code as the truth of
life) and the naiveté of believing that
everything predicted by science will
come true, combine to forge a strong
ideological determinism. This involves
the refusal to see, for example, that the
plausibility of the gene code paradigm is
restricted, that it might help explain
only some, and not all, diseases. The
gene code is not for a moment the book
of books - as AIDS research painfuUy
indicates. The gene code and, with it,
the whole paradigm of the technological,
can be debated. Richard Strohman
attacked "molecular genetic
reductionism" in 'Nature Biotechnology'
(March, 1997), and the technological
paradigm has equally been challenged
by critical AIDS groups, who have defied
the strong hypothesis 'HIV = Death,' as
well as by cultural projects that have
tried to "devaluate biotechnological
suppositions," rather than aestheticizing
them (for example, GameGirl or the
exhibition of different activist groups
both organized in 1994/95
by the Shedhalle in Zürich).
Flexible Agents
The representation of technology plays
an important role in the modemization
of society. Discourse and art are forceful
actors in the process. The plausibility of
techno-culture is mediated far more by
aesthetics than by science. It has been
fabricated through an alliance of
consumer gadgetry, new strategies in
fashion and advertising, the look of
trashy detachment, and the commodity-like
phantasms of subject formation.
The interaction between aesthetics, the
art market and society, is not restricted
to symbolic parameters. The average
urban artist functions as a role model in
another dimensión. S/h?
paradigmatically answers the new
demands of the advanced urban work
forcé: s/he is a social being, acting on
his/her own account, according to a
reflexively stylish and non-determined
social identity, and working in all
categorías at hand. It is not an aesthetic
reflex that we see in some slacker films,
but social reality. The big cities are
crowded with thirty-something people,
sustaining themselves through simple
Jobs in order to pursue their interests,
which they experience as 'eigentlich:'
self-destination and social/professional
agency appear fuUy distinct. This
phenomenon is part of capitalist history.
The land worker was long ago forced to
find work in the city. As in the case of
the Gastarbeiter in Germany in the '60s
and '70s, work was often found in
Fordist corporatíons, amongst members
of a stable corporate identity. Today's
new 'sub-proletariat' of the urban
centers will not end up in a fixed place,
but is rather forced to share different
Jobs and stay beyond any identification
of this kind.
The American theorist Donna
Haraway describes marginalized workers
as those who are thrown out of
consistendy formulated subjectivity. She
cites as her examples, women (often
black) who work in the Sihcon Valley
industry or in the new industrialized
telecommunication zones in India. That
which defines subjectivity - autonomy
and universahty - is precisely that which
is withheld from these women. They find
themselves bodily stigmatized twice - as
women and as black. Haraway refers to
such subjects as cyborgs, as occupying a
subject status that is decentered and
connected to outer agents. The cyborg
might be connected to machines, to
stones, or to animáis. In any case, this is
a status stripped bare of a strong,
universal, white, decision-making, male
subjectivity. This 'decentered' status
appears to offer the chance of
overcoming patriarchal subject fixations.
Toni Negri has pointed out, in reference
the notion of the cyborg, the ambivalent
nature of work under late capitalism.
For Negri, work is a rather repressive
phenomenon and its precarious, or even
'hybrid' status, in a toyotaistically
organized workplace (with lower
hierarchies and work teams on aU levéis
to manage production), is rather
liberatory. Neither author negates the
repressive character of the New
Technologies: both are conscious of its
ambivalences and its impact on subject
formation.
Cyberspace rhetoric has ideological
impHcations to the extent that it mingles
with the process of subject formation in
capitalist societies. The French
philosopher Althusser described ideology
as that which places subjects in the way
they regard themselves: as individual.
autonomous, unitary cells. Ideology
makes 'you' act like a subject (and
therefore you are a subject). Ideology
treats you as the proprietor of your
property, including all your capabilities
and bodily appearances: T plus 'what I
am.' This ideological cali into social
being (interpellation), reappears in the
context of New Technologies. It is seen
in those theoretical debates on 'techno
science' which state tui allegedly epochal
shift in subjectivity: the digital image
(and digital imagabihty) are seen as
entering the inner core of the subject in
formation, 'like a virus.' Lacan has
described the mirror stage - the moment
when the 'becoming' subject, the infant,
realizes its own distinctness from the
world and its own individual wholeness
through seeing itself in the mirror (an
alienating médium), or in another
person (for example, the mother). The
'techno-culture' tries to update Lacan's
position, by evoking the new
technological devices retrojected in the
mirror stage as ersatz, as a digitized
phantasm (ghost), mirroring human
appearance in a 'virtual' gestalt, yet
paradoxically ready to lose its identity
and shape. Others, more critical towards
the emerging new technologies, like the
American literary theorist Rowitha
MüUer, instead detect a purposeful
dramatization of absence and 'Schein:'
"77íe blinding light of digital perfection
now provides the mirror or recognition
or rather mis-recognition, because even
an electronic imaginary ceases to exist
when the plug is pulled. Therefore the
supportive strata of material reality, of
bodies, spaces, masses, and by
association, of women, must be
suppressed and disavowed so as not to
disturb the pristine self-reflection of
cyberspace."
Production of Subjectivity
The production of subjectivity is at the
heart of the new technologies. This is for
philosophical reasons (technologies
claim to work the riddle of both life and
consciousness), but also insofar as they
are part of new consumption strategies
in a society that produces less through
material production than through
Services and leisure-time gadgetry.
"Work isn't working," heralded British
Telecom, in large advertising panels of
summer, 1997. British Telecom was the
first company (in tradition-bound
Europe) to be privatized and to go
public on the stock-market. Deutsche
Telekom foUowed, starting a gigantic
and pretentious media show of making
money out of money by investing in the
brilliant future of new technologies. This
happened during 1997, when official
Germán politics started to acknowledge
globalization and the deregulation of
social standards as the necessary
doctrines for the coming decade. When
everyone in a society is lu-ged to go
private or become corporate, to give up
ideas of collective worker unions, to feel
the pressure of economic survival
without health care as we know it, we
find ourselves determined by a new
spirit of being-for-oneself.
Soft - concerne 'ware' - not soft
What is virtual reality actually, and
what does it have in common with the
internet? The answer is more
complicated than it seems. While the
internet is an easy thing to refer to - the
on-line data telephone complex that
everybody knows - virtual reality is not.
The internet is communication that
creeps through a kind of 'space.' What
type of space is this? To ñame it
"cyberspace' would not be totally on
target, because it does not take much
computing of space in building up that
mediating something that enables
connection. Considering the MUDs and
MOOs, where actors consensually meet
in medieval huts, imaginary streets and
certainly in on-line rooms, the case is
quite different: the 'space' here is verbal
and to a certain extent imaginary, but
still not very 'cyber,' that is, there is not
much cybemetic technology involved.
•
While the MUD (the room where the
'actíon' or conversation takes place) is
virtual, this is as virtual as any board-game
(Monopoly, for example). The
virtual is supposed to be an all-embracing
process of reducing material
expendí ture to a maximal zero. The
absurd new buildings furor of
investment money in London and Berlín
shows that this is somehow not true.
There is at least some antagonism
inherent here. The phantasms of
A material reduction might find their
^ extremes in the forras of artificial Ufe,
L
^ where little animáis 'live' inside the
N coraputer, needing care emd feeding,
blurring the subjective factor in an
(. hallucinatory manner. Tamagotchis
A (little artificial gadget-animals to be
flk taken away) are designed to be fed and
• looked after. Soraebody's got to do fulfill
I these tasks, in order to keep the little
r creature alive, to make it exist. In a
I board game or an internet role-playing
'. gíune, the actors are still necessary, even
° if some "bots' should be involved. Two
n
" Tamagotchis caring for one another, or a
game in which only 'bots' are
participating, is practically senseless, but
might well come to happen.
Beyond the contradictory and
deeply ideological fixing of térras like
Virtuality' in a techno-cultural
normality, there is more to be discussed:
"At the end of the 20th century comes
about the long prophesized convergency
of the inedia, the computer and
telecommunication to a hypermedium.
Once more the untireable longing of
capitalism to diversify and to intensify
the creative potentials ofman is into
changing qualitatively the ways we
work, play and live together. Via the
integration ofdifferent technologies
through common protocols there is
something being produced that is more
than the sum ofits parts." This is an
excerpt from a text by Richard Barbrook
and Andy Cameron titled "The
Califomian Ideology." The text has been
widely acknowledged within the net
community, for its criticality towards the
community of "computer-enthusiasts,
lazy students, innovating capitalists,
engaged activists, fancy academics,
futuristic bureaucrats, and opportunistic
politicians." Barbrook and Caraeron
trace the contradictory nature of the new
alliance that unifies ex-hippies with
capitalists, £md subcultural activists with
oíd school reactionaries. How has it
come to be, they ask, that the new
ideology conflates the goals of west coast
drug users with the likes of Ronald
Reagan, who had the former beaten up
by the pólice in May 1969 in Berkeley's
People's Parks, to the ends of controUing
and suppressing hippies: '^Who could
have seen, that such a contradictory
mixture of technological determinism
and liberal individualism would become
the hybrid orthodoxy of the Information
age-"
Change, Labeled: Change
(Globalization)
That talk of the internet hides
transitions in the economic field, is not
always evident, since internet culture is
about the transition of an era of raaterial
production into a so-called era of
Information, or an Information age. Yet,
the term 'Information age,' with its
pseudo-logical appendix of 'friction free
capitalism' (Bill Gates), is radically
misleading. While the extent of material
production has been lowered (for
example, Volkswagen now makes more
than 50 percent of its profit from
finance deals), it remains indispensable.
Saskia Sassen rhetorically asks: "Why do
they bother to make cars as they make
no profit on the cars?" Her answer is as
foUows: "well, the production of the cars
is a mechanism for concentrating a vast
amount of money within a time-frame of
nine months where you can use it only
on a daily basis in your financial
división and make money. This has
created an enormous distortion. I
mentioned the case of manufacturing,
because financial capital is, yes, to a
large extent, self-referential. It has
invented circuits for its own circulation,
which arefairly autonomous from the
rest of economic systems. However,
manufacturing matters, notjust because
we are still consuming, no matter how
digitized - we all need clothing, we all
need cars and tables - but because
manufacturing is one mechanism for
bringing enormous liquidity into the
system." (Saskia Sassen in an interview
in: "3. hilfe;" Munich, 1997).
Money
In 1992, the investment funds manager
George Soros raade a fortune by
investing in the downfall of a curtency.
That kind of profit-making is effected
through signs and numbers; it is
'virtual.' It was powerful enough to
endanger the British financial economy.
Evidendy, it was not just signs and
nurabers.... The flow of a currency
depends on political and industrial
pararaeters, and it can be manipulated
through stock market operations at the
same time; as Bundes- or Federal Banks
prove frequently, by supporting their
currencies through interventions on the
money market. And yet, the profit raade
at Wall Street and elsewhere is still
astonishing. The ratio between capital
usad in the material world economy and
capital used on financial markets is
1:100 (cf. J. Huffschmid, 1995). The
link between the sphere of the real
(industrial accumulation) and the sphere
of the monetary, is constantly under
reconsideration. The diffuse future of
cyberspace raoney politics is enforcing
this process. Cybermoney is more a
catchy word, than anything else. Right
now, on-line or off-line money
(moneycards which are charged or have
to be linked to the bank) are nothing
more than extended versions of giral
money or credit raoney, extensions of the
so-called deraaterialization of raoney.
But a more intricate question is hidden
behind the notion of 'cybermoney.' This
consists in an ultra-liberal proposal to
conceive of money as something that can
be invented, that can be privatized, and
can be an object of govemmental
steering or marketplace deregulation,
like any other conunodity. The
conservative monetarian F.A. von Hayek
claimed: "Money does not have to be
created legal tender by govemment: like
law, language and moráis it can emerge
spontaneously. Such prívate money has
often been preferred to govemmental
money, but govemment has usuaUy
suppressed it" (cf. Friedrich August von
Hayek (1978), Denationalization of
Money - The Argument Redefined,
Institute of Economic Affairs,
Washington D.C.). Can money - a value-storage
device
{wertaufbewahrungsmittel) - engender
valué by inventing or creating money?
In the first place, this seems to be a
contradiction: since you can not have
'Gedankengeld' (Sohn-Rethel), or
mental money, and since
intersubjectivity is money's precondition,
you cannot have 'prívate money.' The
guarantee of a constant valué is what
the money is about. There can not be
more money than purchasable goods,
because this causes inflation, according
to which money is devalued - inflation
prevails until money and goods are
equal again. The amount of offered
goods (and offered services) is
dependent upon demand. That made
J.M. Keynes say: 'Money is the drink
that stimulates the market.' The postwar
years in the west were deeply structured
by a Keynesian state-apparatus, that not
only govemed the quantity of money-circulation,
but subsidized the prívate
sector by spending large amounts of
pubhc money ('déficit spending').
Schools, hospitals, universities, infra-structures,
the military apparatus,
research and development are receiving
large influxes of govemmental capital, to
the extent that the Germán economist
Elmar Altvater describes it thus: "Public
debt is the wealth of the society."
The situation remains ambivalent.
The enormous budget déficits filled up
by govemmental debts, sum up the
extent to which govemments might not
be able to pay interest rates. Whether
continuous indebtedness is the problem,
or a hideous strategy to guarantee a
limited solution, is difficult to decide,
and remains a major discussion around
Europe's unification. Right now, the
monetarian logic serves the investment
companies, and renders possible
continuous accumulation and
supranational fusión. The profit made
on the financial markets and in
monopoly-like companies is not fictitious
(even under conditions of constantly
enlarging markets, as in the computer
industry, only hyperfusions make profit
worthwhüe, as shown in Apple's bowing
before Microsoft during the summer of
this year). The profit's génesis through
credit and credited credit (which are the
only factors in expanding the quantity of
money circulation), is just more difficult
to recognize. It is not the worker, ñor the
machine, that is the prototype of
contemporary production and wealth.
Neither is it the immaterial concept of
the computer or of bodiless intelligence.
It is, rather, the management of
production, the International división of
tasks to effect ultra-low salaries, the use
of currency differences, and
sophisticated and extensive consumption
strategies.
Money-Aided ECO Design
Under given conditions, the individual
subject finds itself enmeshed in a net of
money matters. Housing, life-style, food
consumption, ennui, excitement,
satisfaction, affection, self-esteem, are
all shaped by financial conditions. It is
not only at Christmas that the individual
household is connected to a flow of
eamed or credited money! The change
in govemmental politics conceming
welfare and the deregulation of
employment restraints, increases the
'stress' that households undergo in
sustaining their survival. While the área
of production decreases, the área of
reproduction becomes more importan!;
the reproduction less of workers, than of
consumers. Post-Fordist production is
forced even more to let consumption
happen on a large scale and to go for
'revolutionary' speed in renewing
consmner goods, with the help of
sophisticated design. The promise of
use-value, the aesthetics of commodities,
a notion invented by post-Marxists like
W.F. Haug in the '70s, became the core
of production. That makes corporations
like Nike or Coca Cola economically
gigantic. But while the use of a Cola is
easy, the use of its
Gebrauchswertversprechen, its
aesthetics, has to be leamed. 'Leamed,'
in relation to the work that is necessary
to stay updated in advertisement-reception,
and 'leamed' in relation to the
individual and fetishistic economy of
promise, optionality, ersatz.
The amount of work that has been
done on behalf of young, independent
cultural producers to develop a techno-culture,
is enormous, and cannot be
gauged economically. It involves
encouraging people all over the world to
leam computer-programming, to
become familiar with the internet, to
leam how to wríte html-protocols, read
cyberpunk literature, leam to feel dizzy
and techno-esque. Surely that was
emancipatory work; there was fun in
reversing an authorítative technology
into funky gadgetry, and making people
feel good. That is true and untrue. It is
like falling in love with somebody new.
Object of Desire
In "Some Thoughts on Theoríes of
Fetishism in the Context of
Contemporary Culture," Laura Mulvey
develops a connection between Marx's
and Freud's understandings of fetishism.
First of all, there is a difference: on the
one hand, for Marx, fetishism involves a
lack of the inscríption of the working
process on the commodity's surface,
while on the other hand for Freud, "the
fetish object acts as a 'sign' in that it
substitutes for the thing thought to be
missing." (cf. p. 11). "There is nothing
intrinsicaUy fetishistic, as it were, about
the commodity in Marx's theory," argües
Mulvey. Maybe Marx himself failed to
explain why a lack of inscription alone
made it possible to make the commodity
something 'magic,' which he himself felt
urged comparison with religious
experience. Marx contained himself to
the explanation of this psychic 'surplus'
which conveys the false appearance of
the commodity's autonomy or the 'life'
that coimnodities seem to contain.
Freud's account seems necessary to an
understanding of some of the
impÜcations of Marx's analysis. Why
does the subject feel sufficiently
attracted to the commodity, to go on
staring at ersatz objects of fetishistic
sheen, at the 'rich sight' (Mulvey), to go
for the abstraction of touch, of
experience?
At the height of Hollywood
cinema, the dark hole of the movie
theater was the space in which the
spectator could feel noiuished by being
fed a "beauty that covers lack," by
witnessing deeds executed on passive
objects, that is, a space for somebody,
being on the hook of ersatz, on the hook
of what the ersatz is about: life. The
spectator does not necessarily believe in
what s/he sees. S/he is just expected to
act as though if s/he does. This is
exactly the way Althusser defined
ideology. Christian Metz's conclusions
regarding who believes in fUm's
narration, are interesting not only for his
analyses of the cinematic apparatus, but
for his further explanation of the impact
of ideologies: "In other words (..) since it
is 'accepted' that the audience is
incredulous, who is it who is credulous?
(..) This credulous person is, of course,
another part of ourselves." (Christian
Metz, The Imaginary Signifier:
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,
London, MacmUlan, 1982, p.72).
This fragment of a person, this
alien gadget of subjectivity, can be
traced through an array of different
theories. Maybe it has to do with the
idealist cogito, that Adorno extracted out
of the commodity fetish as 'falsches
Bewusstsein' (false consciousness), or
with what the sociologist Alfred Sohn-
Rethel made clear to be an effect of the
praxis of money: the
Transzendentalsubjekt. In 1990, Sohn-
Rethel claimed to have found
transcendental subjectivity in the
monetarian coin. He made use of two
interrelated ideas. The 'Realabstraktíon'
of market exchange, abstracts the
qualities of commodities to what they
equal, their valué. The moment of
exchange fímtasizes a pause in the
alteration of commodities through time.
The goods are conceived of as being
beyond time and space, while they have
to be transferred from the oíd owner to
the new one. These 'Realabstraktionen'
are translated into 'Denkabstraktion'
through the ambivalent character of the
coin. The coin introduces a special kind
of 'matter,' since money usually consists
of a substance that does not fade, that
does not lose valué by being used. The
substanceless subst¿mce, which becomes
common practice in the market-place, is
guaranteed through every emitting
financial institution, the function of
which are to replace 'used' coins by new
ones. Sohn-Rethel argües that the money
owner identifies with money, that is,
with its pseudo-transcendental state.
While Sohn-Rethel was only interested
in proving the descent of idealist
philosophy from an historical and
economic phenomenon, his proposition
can be extended by relating the
transcendental subject position to
everyday reflexivity: by considering
his/her own steps - halting, breathing,
trying to make decisions - the subject
becomes the self-reflexive owner of his
or her own qualities, his or her own
money, or possibilities.
To the ends of putting that
fragment of a person, that everyday
cogito, into action, we might connect it
to Fierre Klossowski's thoughts in
La Monnaie Vivante ("The Living
Money"). Klossowski's cryptic but
extremely interesting book, starts with
the conception of "le suppot," the
carrier, screen, surface of personal
identity. This screen is not due to outer
attributions - it is due to the effect of a
rejection of púlsate motives. But these
pulsions are part of commodity
movement, a source of exploitation, as
well as an extensión of what Rosa
Luxemburg, in her reading of Marx,
referred to as "fortgesetzte
Akkumulation" ("ongoing accmnulation"
- in opposition to Marx's "originary
accumulation"). Klossowski calis upon
US to imagine: 'What if we would not get
paid by money, but by other people?'
Money would then come cióse to its own
paradoxical core:
that is, the real thing, by being the
ultimate use-value -on the real media:
the sensation.
Klossowski's book is a mise en
scene of thinking (akin to Michel
Foucault's "Theatrum Philosophicum"),
rather than a theoretical approach. But
it reveáis a certain insufficiency of the
conceptualization of consumer society as
we know it. It is neither a rational
process, ñor a management of work and
financial options alone. There must be
something more to be exploited, to be
addressed, to be shaped, to be moved.
This is certainly not Ufe in its
unalienated state, and yet there is
nothing to be alienated (since this
presupposes something unaüenated, real,
puré etc.). But hfe - being at stake - acts
as a precondition, or, psychoanalytically
speaking, as a motivation. This is
pumped up by fetishism, because the
deepest longing does not consist in any
experience, not in Genus, pleasure, since
this is limited, but in 'possessing'
motivation (cf. Marjorie Garber). And
this is exactly what the 'screen' - the
fragmented self - is able to feel
nourished by.
AU the big V's (Virtual reality, -
space, -life, -sex, -capitalism) are the
technicalities of putting this subject
position into action, existential promises
of coded use-values.