The decisive moment for the American Empire and the initiation for whatever era we live in (post-post-modern?) happened on August, 15th, 1971. On that day, Richard M Nixon took the US off the gold standard. It was a decision bred from obvious pressures. The US industrial economy shuddered before the growing potency of Europe (mainly west Germany) and Japan. The process of dollarization (which had hooked both zones on American supremacy) threatened to unravel US power. While the Bretton-Woods accord had created a strong dollar at $35 for an ounce of gold (allowing other currencies to devalue to rebound, while buying up US dollars as a reserve), it had also pegged the US as a global backstop. This phenomenon made the US foundational for the "world economy", but it could also result in a pummeling. If reserve banks were unsure of future US growth, they may cash out their reserves for gold. Additionally, there are fair reasons to suspect US gold holdings were themselves mist, with theories of an empty Fort Knox not entirely off the mark. To save the US as the global reserve currency and defend the tentacles of the dollar, Nixon made a "temporary" measure to uncouple gold and the dollar. And, following the predominant crisis pattern of the twentieth century, this exceptional state has never ceased. Thus US finance entered a radically new stage, a phenomenon that had been growing for the better part of a century.
This fits Agamben's Benjaminian criticism of "capitalism" as the nihilistic ouroboros of self-reference. The dollar had become pure capital through its dematerialization. The dollar was simply a dollar, an entirely empty and meaningless signifier. Per Benjamin's retooling of the Weberian thesis, capitalism was not the secularization of the Protestant faith, but an entirely parallel phenomenon. Capitalism was a parasite that utilized Christian doctrine and practice, and emerged later as the churches became weak. I would qualify the Benjaminian thesis by disaggregating concepts. As a mystical Marxian anarchist, it's obvious Benjamin (and Agamben along with him) disparage capitalism simpliciter. However, it's clear one can distinguish between different forms of capitalism, especially in relation to different modes of production.
Weber's thesis was always an analysis of the "spirit" of capitalism, which was mainly in reference to the industrial manufacturing of England, the United States, and Germany. In this sense, one can see how the very particular "worldly asceticism" of post-puritan Protestants formed the ideological matrix of the petit bourgeois shopkeepers and artisanal craftsmen. Thus one can see genealogical ties between Richard Baxter and Benjamin Franklin, but more importantly "robber barons" like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. It was the self-possession, frugality, and work-ethic which motivated both the small weaver as well as the major steel producer. Working out salvation with fear and trembling meant fulfilling one's worldly "vocation"coram Deo. The Biblical sense of "calling" and its medieval canonization as monasticism defined worldly labors. Industry and progress were divine as the postmillennialism became a jubilant mood of expectation.
However, Benjamin's thesis examines the concept more in light of finance and financialization. Unlike England's "gentlemanly capitalists" which emerged from aristocratic intermingling with finance and the service economy, America and Germany saw the development of a financial class out of its major industrial forces. And as it's happened in the American world, this virtual and dematerialized financial capitalism has simply burst out of industrial manufacturing's corpse like a xenomorph. The two theories dovetail if this capitalism is understood as a discrete phenomenon, a religion of credit depending on a religion of worldly asceticism. The former befits the mass democracy of contemporary share-holder capitalism, citizenship as entitlement to scraps. The mixed-economy of post-war Europe and America realized this economic mode, reflected in infinite plasticity. The need for free movement of capital began to butt against static regimes of private property, the old bourgeoisie pushed into a reactionary stance. It's in this sense that even a conservative or a libertarian could countenance certain critiques of capitalism. It has become a handmaiden to the welfare state, which sees its purpose as management of resources for maximum investment. The Marxian prophecy - that capitalism will melt all that's solid into air - gains credence here. The drive towards greater development and greater access of financialization (where all things are given a quantified value) can run against claims of property. The forces of progress becomes a revolutionary force that turned the old left into the old right.
This financial capitalism (in no way averse to statism or regulatory management) is what produces this empty sign. Capitalism is a permanent cult, a liturgy that never comes to an end. In a way, this makes capitalist liturgy of acquisitions and sales as an anti-mass, since there is never a dismissal, never a fulfillment. It is radically ecumenical, since there's no dogma (thus the use and discarding of the secular puritanism of industrial capitalism). And most importantly, befitting pure cult without end, there's not salvation. Capitalism only produces debt/guilt [Schuld], which should not (and often cannot) be paid. Unlike the older notions of thrift to end debt, this form of capitalism can only thrive on debt. While early America rejected the importation of this form of mercantile capitalism in the Hamiltonian system - which depended entirely on incurring national debts - such became the norm in the creation of the Federal Reserve. In fact, debt becomes wealth, and many become powerful through the buying and selling of debt. Instead of old monetarist theory - where the materiality of gold signaled money was, in some sense, a positive phenomenon - debt-based fiat money creates a zone of indistinction. Debt and credit, works and faith, blend entirely into each other.
For Benjamin, it was not only the bankers and their backers who oversee this religion. If the financier is a priest of capitalism, the hermeneuticians of suspicion are its prophets. Benjamin saw Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as complicit in this destructive world-order. Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of god and the superman, which was none other than the beginning of this new era. God had died, but his potency had passed to his killers. This pantheism (or panentheism) was now the endless dance of capital. Freud had transformed the world through his charismatic cult of psychotherapy, but this new pastoral practice presupposed the regime of debt. One never found forgiveness or atonement, but simply became Homo vulnus, that must always pay interest on the debt-wounds of his self conscious. And Marx hoped to wield this phenomenon into socialism, not recognizing socialism always would be another vehicle to house it. A financialized economy leaps out of industrialization, whether mustached bourgeoisie or the rugged proletariat vanguard run the show.
Thus the incisive monologue from demiurgic corporate officer from the movie Network. After stirring up viewers with his enraged rant about the corruption of America, George Beale, an otherwise colorless news commentator, electrifies the station. Rather than lose his job, Beale threatens suicide and harasses the slumbering masses. This theatrics is permitted until Beale makes known an otherwise unknown business deal involving his news network. A Saudi conglomerate sought to buy the American conglomerate which owned Beale's network. Having howled about it, viewers phoned their congressmen to complain about foreign money buying out American media. Invited to the heavens of corporate headquarters, Beale is given a "sales pitch" from Chairman Arthur Jensen. The speech is worth quoting extensively:
"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale! And I won't have it! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no third worlds, there is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! AND YOU WILL ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel."
Aptly titled both a sales pitch and an evangel, such is the liturgy of financialization.
However, Agamben wants to develop Benjamin's thesis further. What if there was a kind of dogma at its root? What was the "faith" of this new religion? Capitalism indeed was a parasite on Christianity, precisely out of the importance of faith. On the streets of Greece, Agamben was stunned by the name of a bank: Trapeza tes pisteos. It was a bank of credit, of faith. In this way Capitalism was the religion of faith par excellence. Indeed, it was faith alone taken to the extreme, a faith in faith, a pure credit that was entirely self-referential. It was this fact that defined the religion of capitalism:
"And just as, according to Benjamin, capitalism is a religion in which the cult has been emancipated from every object and guilt from every sin, thus from every possible redemption, so too, from the point of view of faith, does capitalism have no object: it believes in the pure fact of believing, in pure credit, which is to say, in money. Capitalism, then, is a religion in which faith - credit - has been substituted for God. Said differently, since the pure form of credit is money, it is a religion whose God is money." (69-70)
This relates to Nixon's permanent state-of-exception because now, untethered from gold, dollars become a perfect manifestation of money. It is entirely self-referential, which will only be more so as Bitcoin (likely a NatSec op) has cleared the ground for the creation of Dollar coins. The USD has now "emancipated itself from every external referent, cancels its idolatrous connection with gold, and affirms itself in absoluteness" (70). Unlike the old Christian faith, out of which this radicalized sola fide in fidem has grown, this credit has no end. There is no hope, for the "substance of things hoped for" (Hebrews 11:1) which had constituted faith is no more. As its own referent, faith has completely collapse all ontological distinctions. There is no sign and thing signified, they've become one and the same, indistinct and constantly confused. The revelation that money is not real forms its own hyper-reality. The unreality of capital thus allows it complete domination, since it is nowhere and everywhere. This omnipresence (or drive towards it) leads to ever greater financializaiton. Having completely gutted and eaten out native industry, finance must infest more and more business. Firms must increasingly mortgage themselves to banks, based on future productivity which has little to do with market cues. Say's Law becomes sublimated, as production and growth become increasingly empty signifiers. Rather the shrewd suspicion that kept Henry Ford away from banks for as long as he was able, debt linked to future production becomes the only meaningful metric. Even as economies become increasingly zombified, with the putrid flesh of rusted factories falling off as it lumbers along, finance will continue. The liturgy will go on as investors will push the logic of quantified and rationalized commodification to further open up markets. Whether it's child pornography, the organ market (legal and illegal), web-camera prostitution (a commodification of a virtual body), all of these things represent the restless and endless anti-mass. There is no dismissal, there's no atonement. Sin must reign.
It's not a coincidence that this form of anti-material capitalism flowers with and within mass democracy. Rather than the ordered liberty of the old bourgeois order, a government formed around the infinitely plastic masses. Accompanied with procedurals and managerialism, where government is a neutral machine institution to be used to whatever end along the lines of formal rules to manage and allocate resources, democracy becomes an empty signifier. In no way like ancient Athens, there is polis or politics, only economization. It's no wonder that masturbatory philosophy of Jacques Derrida, along with other post-moderns, finds democracy interesting (and venerable). Capitalism and democracy flow naturally with a theory of semiotics that ends in babble. Drawing on Debord's analysis of the spectacle as complete abstraction of art and money as entirely self-referential, so too has language ceased to signify anything but itself. Transformed through advertising (thus language simply as a tool of commodification), speech no longer needed any particular referent. The denotative function of language - a reference to an extra-linguistic world - ceased in the same moment as money ceasing to refer to any extra-monetary world. Gold may have been an increasingly universal standard of money, but gold still existed outside the world of market relations. Its value was alien to market relations of labor and production (hence the invalidity of all labor theories of value), and was a gesture towards a world outside of humanity. But what is language if it only signifies itself?
The old universal standards of quality control - such as the gold exchange - was an institution of safe-guarding the caesura between gold as thing and gold as commodity. Similarly, logic protected the gap between language's signifying and the real it signified. With the nullification of materiality and reality, the self-referential gap becomes indistinguishable. Logic breaks down as language is freed from all restraints. The void at the heart of all these relations becomes all-consuming. Money becomes the only commodity, revealing the emptiness of all commodities; Language becomes mere communication, revealing the emptiness at the heart of the world. This zone of indistinction between sign and signified results in the apparatus of the will. Just as the power of money remains through belief (money as accredited, credible, and credit), so too does language continue to exist through the imperative. Today's social democrats are too mealy mouthed to speak as clearly as their national socialist cousins. They will not command, but offer ominous obligations. Black lives matter is neither an argument nor a denotative statement of fact (since the statement is a moral judgement). What does it mean? It's a vague threat to conform. Nevertheless, ronaworld has created a greater sense of crisis and threat. Wear a Mask! Social Distance! Get Vaccinated! Of course, Conservative Inc. has produced its own slate of imperatives. Make America Great Again! Back the Blue! These are vague, somewhat universal, commands that describe an unreality that is summoned into existence. The imperative is neither real nor unreal, and thus whatever it impacts cannot be said. The world becomes entirely plastic before will-worshipers battling for control.
Yet every command creates crisis. An imperative may come to be, or not, and this produces an anxiety of apocalyptic dimensions. Agamben rightly cites Ivan Illich's claim that the modern world is neither anti-Christian nor post-Christian, but the most explicitly Christian Era in Human history. It's a betrayal of Christ, yes, but it's entirely ecclesiastical and apocalyptic worldview that dominates. In relation to the religion of capitalism, it's the constant production of crisis. One can easily become exhausted by the sheer number of claims about the end of capitalism. Lenin's critique of "late capitalism" (imperial and financial) in the early twentieth century seems ridiculous, only to be outmatched by far less incisive commentators who repeat the same nostrum. Any day the system will collapse. Every war, every depression, every epidemic will have a swarm of leftists announce the immanent end of things. Yet the liturgy goes on. What is the telos of Capitalism? It has, again, siphoned off a Christian eschatological sense of Apocalypse - defined as linear time hitting the wall. The new preachers of doom are the secular priestcraft of professionals:
"today it is above all the scientists, transformed into apocalyptic prophets, who announce the imminent end of life on earth. And in every sphere, in the economy as in politics, the capitalist religion declares a state of permanent crisis (crisis etymologically means 'definitive judgement'), which is, at the same time, a state of exception that has become normal, whose only possible outcome presents itself, precisely as in the Apocalypse, as 'a new earth.' But the eschatology of the capitalist religion is a blank eschatology, without redemption or judgment" (74-75)
It's not only a pandemic that seems to offer a constant threat. It's also the never-ending environmental catastrophe of Global Warming and its Malthusian apologists. The world will be doomed, all life wiped out, unless western corporations start buying carbon credits. It's no surprise a traffic in a fiat indulgences mirrors the traffic in fiat money. The crisis generates its own solutions, which pass in the night without much of a twinkle of thought. Nevertheless, many people groan beneath the policy decisions that regulate movement, thought, and exchange to operate within these parameters. Green theology is nothing more than an avatar for the empty cult. Alarmist imperatives summon their own results. A never-ending crisis must constantly generate its own solutions, which salve the conscience even as they're incapable of concluding. The dark secret is that the Earth (more a mythologeme than a geo-spatial thing) can never be saved. And because this crisis has no conceivable end, its beginning becomes folded into an infinitely expanded presentism. The crisis is now!! Yet at that very moment, the anarchic origins of the crisis is unveiled. Capitalism can never end because it is nothing; climate change can never end because it is nothing. It has no origins, it simply appears, and no amount of data-plotting demonstrate any coherent account of a "beginning". The entire system runs from a void.
It's in this way that capitalism, as much as mass democracy or post-modern art, reflect the zone of indistinction that has plagued the West's metaphysical fracture. The quest for an origin and an end has, in most Western history, produced pairs of dualities that maintain their own borders. Authority and power, spiritual and temporal, family and city, subject and object - these were maintained and their relation investigated without collapse. Yet the question remains how one crosses the threshold, or how to tolerate indistinction, or even where the binary emerged. If, for example, several families constituted a city, what was *it* that allowed this transition? The current era is unique for this collapse has become increasingly severe, producing more chaos and more confusion, and thus the importance of the apparatus to determine what is one and what is the other. The liquidity thus takes a form, but from the voice of the magician that demands. The value of the dollar exists at the bellowing of the Federal Reserve.
But this too flows from its parasitic relationship to Christianity. The ontological aporia, criss-crossed through an apparatus of the imperative, flows from trinitarian theology. God is an-arche, without origin. Triadology - especially Latin theology influenced by Augustinian reflection and Boethius - emphasized the an-archic nature of the Godhead. At the center of the trinitarian relations between Father-Son-Spirit is an emptiness, the no-foundation and no-origin point. Agamben references the Arian controversy, where the debate revolved around whether Christ was an-archic like the Father or originated "in the beginning" [en arche]. But however these relations are affirmed, they raise the question of how precisely governance of the world in trinitarian terms can occur if there's no source or origin point. If there's no beginning for God's economy of the world, could that also mean an increasingly elusive end? Capitalism fully secularizes this phenomenon and brings the instability of the fracture to a more intense form. Thus the crisis point in theology proper, when God presumed a hidden God, that every revelation cast the shadow of Deus Absconditus, reveals the constant crisis. Behind the organization of all things, given the veneer of order and nature, lay a caesura that depends upon the skiff of the will to cross. Thus as a Luther trembled before the naked God of election, who stands behind (without comprehension) the Christ of mercy, there too does welfare economies become the mask for the naked will of financiers. Freedom becomes uncertain and must choose, bolted to its own ontologization at the behest of the anarchies governing of power. The final vision of the imperative is the demand to live or die from a source unknown and fundamentally indiscernible. The Invisible Hand is invisible precisely because it does not exist.
Agamben ends the essay without conclusion, but a sketch of what is to come:
"Against the anarchy of power, I do not intend to invoke a return to a solid foundation in being: even if we ever possessed such a foundation, we have certainly lost it or have forgotten how to access it. I believe, however, that a clear comprehension of the profound anarchy of the societies in which we live is the only correct way to pose the problem of power and, at the same time, that of true anarchy. Anarchy is what becomes possible only when we grasp the anarchy of power. Construction and destruction here coincide without remainder. But, to cite the words of Michael Foucault, what we gain in this way 'is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think'." (77)
The rest of the essay will develop the thesis a bit further.
In Ivan Karamazov's Parable of the Grand Inquisitor, the returned Christ is confronted with the bloodless and nearly omnipotent cardinal of the church. While the peasants of Spain rejoiced at the miracles they witnessed, the appearance of the inquisitor immediately cowed them. Arrested and imprisoned, the cleric informs the Christ that the same crowd which thronged him will cheer on his destruction. It was precisely the Word's failure to address these people in terms they understand that brought about his doom. If Christ had only accepted the serpentine promises in the Wilderness. If he had turned stones into bread, he would have won the loyalty of the masses. If he had performed the spectacle of the Temple Jump, he would have amazed the world into divine obedience. If he had bent the knee, all the kingdoms of the world would have been his. Did not Man's maker understand the needs of man? Only a few could bear the impossible possibility of obedience. Most men are weak, cowardly, derivative of their material conditions. If the Son of God would not accept man as man, then it was up to the Church to do so. God had abandoned man to an impossible path, the Church would govern as necessary, telling them comforting myths as babes and holding their hands as they expire. An ascetic who had loved God but departed, the cold hatred revealed a jaded love. Nevertheless, the Messiah should die. The Cardinal will kill God to defend the faith, maintaining the illusion no matter the cost.
Taking the parable on its own terms, and read through Agamben, the Cardinal represents the anarchy of power at the heart of the Church's rule. There was no origin, since God was clearly an incompetent creator and governor. There was no end, as Christ could not return. Instead, the clergy would maintain the non-existent power at the center of their power. In the name of a silent God would they act, never to conclude, only to govern. But the problem presents its own solution, for it is precisely at the moment that the anarchy of power is unveiled, it is as a counter to the anarchic freedom of the Christ. The Jesus of this parable does not speak. Instead, within the walled Babylon of the Cardinal, Christ opens new possibilities: the lame walk, the deaf hear, the blind see, the dead rise. What is the basis of this power? Where did Christ come from? Where will Christ go? In both cases, the biblical answer is God: the an-arche. Redemption does not happen in a moment of return or a moment of progress. Instead, the Kingdom of God is within you. The spiritual aristocracy of grace, the potential beyond all potential, the hope beyond all hope. It is the free life Agamben's beloved St Francis, who makes use his very life to establish a living form. He lives, but not him, but Christ in him.
In terms of this empty liturgy of capitalism, the endless rolls of finance's dominion, the objective is not to roll back the clock. No matter what happens, the "idolatry" of gold or silver will never return. Nevertheless, this creates an opportunity for a truly free market. Instead of entirely empty credit, the void at the heart of a commodity transformed into money is held at a standstill. Instead, a paper money linked to a wide plethora of commodity goods would overthrow a theory of endless debt without re-erecting the golden calf. A form of barter would be restored, though one that does not seek to dissolve money (or is a result from the loss of money) as some anarcho-socialists desire. Money isn't the problem in itself, but it remains as something that reflects the ephemeral nature of use-value. The defense of private property does not require a highly elaborate constitutional-state, which would only feed off the endless regulatory bureaucracies and litigious bottom-feeders that are concerned with cash-value. Instead, commodities and money are held at a stand-still, so man may recognize the insuperable gulf between what is and the medium of exchange. Instead, a credit would be suspended, and commodity exchange would not depend on the never-ending illusion of future wealth. This is not a firm or sophisticated economic analysis or platform, but simply the rudiments of a way beyond the nightmare capitalism - if it can be rightly so called - of the current era. If the liturgical production of Fiat Currency is not ended, the whole world will simply become money - a perverse fulfillment of God being in all things.
The an-arche of Christ opens the possibility of a faith suspended from works. The final work of Christ upon the cross was not the production of a new bank, with new notes to trade (a more potent righteousness substance that can be trafficked in). Rather, as fulfillment of the Law, the atonement put an end to its imperative. All these fake debts are wiped away, unveiled in their unreality. Thus the eschatological prayer of Christ calls upon the saint to forgive all debts, to neither seek them nor live beneath them. The future-oriented nature of the Law's command were manifest now in their reality. You will not steal, not because a punishment hangs over your head, but because you are now a cheerful giver. The door to righteousness, to a world of justice, appears amidst the wreckage. True Christology is the messianic, which defines biblical apocalypse -- it is the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. And the messianic is not merely a religious disposition, but unites all modes of thought, whether economic or political. In a strange twist, the future of politics must flow from this point. The only way towards sound money is good Christology.
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