Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology

Matter

Matter Post-Kantian philosophy has been dominated by the assumption that being in itself is matter in its self-plenitude. Consciousness, accordingly, has been conceived as the agent of a contagious lack that infests matter itself by merely perceiving it. This enduring illusion, nevertheless, points to the truth. It is because being is the power of its self-actualization, absolute potentiality, the overlap of lack (of actual materiality) and excess (of power of actualization), or, rather, lack only insofar as it is excess, that the moment it is actualized in its empirical modes it splits itself into the two empirical givens of irrecoverable lack (thought, conceived as consciousness) and unmitigated plenitude (thoughtless materiality). In other words, the truth pointed to by the illusion is that the division between matter and value is modal or empirical—in the substance itself, these two attributes are inseparable—so that any ontological conception of matter as severed from value is doomed to be illusory. Nevertheless , to the extent that we also need to account for the fact that in our empirical reality matter and value constitute two distinct modes, we must find appropriate concepts to express this distinction without compromising our monistic ontology. The development of both science and capitalist economy indicate that chemical consistency can no longer provide a tenable criterion for defining matter ontologically. If, according to the relativity theory, matter is energy, and if, as we see in everyday late capitalism, all possible forms of information are sold and bought like other material commodities, we have to revise our concepts of usevalue and exchange-value so that the distinction between materiality and immateriality becomes a derivative of the object’s function. We have to replace the distinction of use-value qua material object of utility, which corresponds to the phenomenological in-itself, with a meta-phenomenological in-itself and conception of matter, defined as 23 24 / Being, Time, Bios anything insofar as it functions as a use-value, that is, as it exists in the world of production time—however immaterial (in the canonical sense of the word) this object may be, from pure energy, quanta, MBs, to words and images. Objects of utility may sometimes appear as “immaterial ” as the signifier, electricity, and information—leaving aside the fact that, chemically speaking, even these presumably immaterial entities do involve matter. But this does not change by a farthing the eternal law of the commodity to have a double empirical manifestation, as usevalue (in-itself) and as exchange-value (for-itself), both of which are the empirical manifestations of surplus-value, the capitalist modulation of surplus, which is undifferentiated immaterial-matter. Kojin Karatani rightly stresses that the assumption that the stage of informatized capitalism renders Marx’s analysis obsolete is entirely misled and misleading. Karatani’s reason for arguing this is that information, “as the father of cybernetics, Robert Wiener, suggested,” is “originally nothing but difference ,” and capital “lives on by the difference,” that is, “surplus value,” regardless of “whether it gets [it] from solid objects or fluid information.” Consequently, “the nature of capital is consistent even before and after its dominant production branch shifted from heavy industry to the information industry” (2003, 267). But we should add to Karatani’s argument that just as any product, “solid” or “fluid,” is in its essence always “fluid” (difference or surplus-value), taken as an empirical use-value it is essentially always “solid,” however “fluid” it may be chemically, insofar as it is precisely a use-value—an in-itself (in our meta-phenomenological sense). Concomitantly, whatever functions as exchange-value will constitute the meta-phenomenological immaterial for-itself. In short, regardless of their physical qualities, all use-values are material, and all exchange-values are immaterial, while surplus is the doublet material-immaterial or in-itselffor -itself, of which they are the two empirical manifestations. In more tangible economic terms, the distinction between use-value or the in-itself and exchange-value or the for-itself corresponds to the distinction between the inability and ability of procuring surplus-value. Information, for instance, taken as use-value consists of symbols (words, images, etc.) that express semantic values (signifieds or concepts), but it is not in this quality that they can contribute to the accumulation of surplus. The function of the symbol to express a concept is merely its use-value: signifiers are things whose use-value is to evoke concepts. In order for information to procure surplus-value, the additional quality is required that...