TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation

5. The Immortality Machine of Capitalism

5 The Immortality Machine of Capitalism Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else. —Derrida In 1833, Karl Marx turned twelve years old and alchemy, Frankenstein, and capitalism awaited his coming. What Marx would come to understand better than anyone else in the nineteenth century was the historical sociality—the “social brain” of emergent capitalism—of all human events, and it was Marx who first demonstrated how the alchemical dream of immortality had been displaced from the individual study of Agrippa or Dr. Heidegger to the entirety of the social world itself. Capitalist society itself had become an enormous alchemical laboratory, working incessantly to transform the dross of unused nature into the gold of surplus value. But elixirs, death, vampires, and ghosts—all remnants and revenants of the so-called past—could not be kept out of this laboratory any more than from those of earlier social formations. And they would be coupled with the machine. 79 In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851), Marx notes that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Just as people are beginning to liberate themselves, they take on a “time-honored disguise and [a] borrowed language” in order to present the “new scene of world history.” This new scene, Marx says, is a “conjuring up of the dead” (1978b, 595). Theater, séances, philosophy, political economy, dreams, and languages are all conflated in the attempt to express the radically new and its relation to the ancient as time pivots into a different historical era, even as its participants are “set back into a dead epoch” (596). The present takes on the form of the past; the past strides into the present as a “caricature.” And the “bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly arisen small holding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its blood and marrow and throws them into the alchemistic cauldron of capital” (611; my emphasis). Vampires roam the earth; capitalism is a cauldron of alchemical ferment. This is a witches’ brew indeed, and the philosopher’s stone must lie close at hand, if still hidden, waiting until the right moment to make its appearance. Norman O. Brown, in Life against Death, explored this displacement in Marx, reminding us that With the transformation of the worthless into the priceless and the inedible into food, man acquires a soul; he becomes the animal which does not live by bread alone, the animal which sublimates. Hence gold is the quintessential symbol of the human endeavor to sublimate—“the world’s soul” (Jonson). The sublimation of base matter into gold is the folly of alchemy and the folly of alchemy’s pseudosecular heir, modern capitalism. (1959, 258) He then cites several of Marx’s references to alchemy in Capital and concludes that “Freud’s critique of sublimation foreshadows the end of this flight of human fancy, the end of the alchemical delusion, the discovery of what things really are worth, and the return of the priceless to the worthless” (259). But sublimation, like the go(l)d standard, is in essence the process of transmutation. It is the incessant movement of significa80 TechnoLogics tion, regardless of how much the ego consciously desires to translate permanently from “low” to “high,” from the flux of desire to the stability of an established logos, meaning, or value. The sublimated will always de-sublimate; the inflated value will always deflate. Freud’s critique does illuminate the interior workings of the imagination—including the deflective sublimations practiced by capitalism—but the “alchemical delusion,” since it is a necessary fiction, will continue to be reproduced in different forms.1 The end of ideology, dream, or myth, is the beginning of a new, or newly framed, ideology, dream, or myth. What Baudrillard calls the “vital illusion” is requisite to all forms of the production of meaning, which may be precisely that which is under threat in the transepochal. Alchemy has always required a workplace and instruments, and it...