°Commodity politics
Consider the ‘promise of democracy’. In “Lingua Amissa” (1995), Hamacher writes:
commodity politics is subordinate to the strict dictate of equality among abstract concepts. Commodity-exchange-language is accordingly restricted to a grammatical-syntactic minimum in which only propositions of equality can be formed. Such propositions regularly purport that a particular quantum of one thing is equal to a particular quantum of another thing, regardless of whether this thing currently exists or not. […] They can thus at any time contain a suggestions that is in fact never made good by a reality or that can never be made good. [… Therefore,] commodity-language is structured as a functional suggestion of equality [… ,] its propositions of equivalence - and it knows no propositions that cannot be reduced to equivalence - only speak, in principle, by feigning the equivalence of their elements. In speaking with one another, commodities promise one another their exchangeability.
This is the ‘promise of democracy’. Derrida will write about its performative and spectral aspects. Balibar will write about ‘equaliberty’. They will both, as have many others, written about ‘a democracy to come’. All of them insist on the aporetic aspects of this. Hamacher continues:
What can never be conclusively avoided but, to be sure, can be opposed - what must be opposed - is the possibility contained within the promise’s tendency not to be a promise but instead to be a totalitarian program, an immutable prescription, or a plan, or instead, quite simply, not to be at all. What must be opposed is the organisation of the future; and what fights against it is the longing that the future might be otherwise. […] This is the rift in the world that the world has opened up with the Marxist promise of a world. It has become no longer necessarily a cleft between classes - but it is still this class antagonism as well.
All well and good. The question, however, is whether the aporetic temporality of the promise is the exposure of the finite to infinitude or, merely, the infinite expansion of the finite (the World Market, in other words). Marx wrote that cloth “betrays its thoughts in that language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities.” Cloth, he says, “speaks”. So, put another way, the question would be: is the ‘promise of democracy to come’ the interminable chatter of commodities? I’d say that it is.
One of the reasons I am an anthropologist rather than a historian or professional Half-Life player, is that the cross cultural perspective allows some relief from the totalitarianism of commodity fetishism. So, here is a cross cultural perspective on your analogy.
The difficulty with it, in my view, is that the circulation of commodities is only one circulation we know of. There are other kinds of circulation, of which two come to mind straight away: generalised reciprocity and gift exchange. In generalised reciprocity, no expectation of equality between things is established, only the maintenance of certain social relations (reciprocity); the paradoxical sound of it derives from our near inability to think of reciprocity without measuring, but that is precisely what the cosmology and social ontology of, eg. Aboriginal groups, permits. On the other hand, gift exchange permits the circulation of things which are carefully measures, but not only on quantitative terms, thus the armshells and bracelets that circulate in the Massim end up having particular personal characteristics - as Mauss pointed out, a thing is a different gift from the same thing, if it is given by another person; as Chris Gregory argued (in my view convincingly) in Gifts and Commodities the structure of such exchange is radically different from that of commodity exchange, we have here anthropomorphisation rather than alienation; though the regimes can interflex. Now, beyond Gregory, we have the careful work of people like Rappaport and Harris who demonstrate that this kind of exchange distributes resources in a biosocially functional way; ie. generalised reciprocity (obviously) and gift exchange (not so obviously) perform the function of optimalized allocation without (this is my inference) operating by the calculation of value, that being confined to the commodity nexus. Note that the optimalization is invisible to the participants, or what amounts to the same thing, it only emerges at the point of translation, when the societies and their respective lifeworlds must be coupled; occasionally, in gift exchange systems, there is no etic optimalization and exchange is indeed viewed in a spectrum of contest that extends into warfare. Gifts can be lethal.
Thus, it is possible to argue that, since communities that have these kinds of circulations have equilibertarian or ‘democratic’ motiffs (for instance, the infamous model of concensus decision making), the analogy you suggest at the end is not necessarily valid. It is indeed possible to imagine democracy, or at any rate collective decision making with equalitarian tendencies which are not the chatter of commodities, but the mediation of gifts. So though now I see a little bit more what you mean about the problem of the coming democracy, I think it is possible to think democracy outside this. (Actually, it’s elementary, the commodity form being obviously antithetical even to liberal principles.
This posting does clarify a lot of what you were saying in the previous discussion, so thanks for that.
TCO [August 20, 2005 @ 12:33 pm]
I can’t see much of an antithesis between liberalism and the commodity-form. They both have a ‘doubled character’. And gifts are not equivalent. Else they are no longer gifts. But a discussion of gift economies and reciprocity is a discussion about what an alternative ‘political-economy’ might be. So, again, I think you are capable of answering your own questions.
s0metim3s [August 21, 2005 @ 1:35 am]
This post has got me thinking - isn’t there a hinge absent in your post? That the process of exchange is only possible because of the common substratum, to commodity that belongs to all but that is simultaneously excluded: money.
I wonder about exchange within an informational order, where ‘protocol’ (following Alexander Galloway) becomes the transcendental exchanged. The idealistic response would fall into the Hardt & Negri-esque positions on post-Fordist production - however, more realistically, a shift of this kind would begin to explain the gift economies of P2P and current debate surrounding intellectual property.
There is, of course, much at stake here - whether or not such conflicts represent democracy realized or multitudal forces at work is another rhetorical question.
Michael Dieter [August 23, 2005 @ 6:11 pm]
Hello Michael,
That’s true. Money, but also abstract labour. Or money as it relates to abstract labour. And there are a lot of debates about IP and p2p, which I think you’re more familiar with than I am. Care to explain the reference to protocols?
s0metim3s [August 23, 2005 @ 11:29 pm]
Alexander Galloway writes of ‘protocol’ as a form of control in informational systems - it’s basically a theorization of ‘code’ as law, much like Lawrence Lessig. I was using it quite generally, I guess, to think about how data might become a universal mode of exchange - realized in the establishment of abstract technological protocols, instead of money.
Because doesn’t the commodity language as a ‘turning’ or a shift rely on money for exchange - use-value to value, concrete labor to abstract labor, private labor to social, and so on. At this point I’m thinking of the idea of ‘derangement’ from Marx, quoted by Hamacher:
“If I say the coat, the boots, etc. related to the cloth as the general embodiment of abstract human labor, the derangement of this expression is obvious. But if the producers of the coat, the boots, etc. relate these commodities to the cloth - or to gold or silver, it makes no difference - as a general equivalent, the relation of their private labor to social collective labor appears to them precisely in this deranged form.”
I read this in terms of the presence of money; essentially, the catalyst that makes possible a link between general equivalence and a singular product. Commodity-language, therefore, appears objectively veiled; where the supernatural or spectral elements of the fetish are materially construed as a morphantom.
Under P2P, or within an informational milieu, this exchange is vapourized. In a sense, made more spectral, magical, surreal, abstract. One consequence is that the digital gift economy operates beyond scarity; which is to say, in ‘the shadow of the future’ - maybe it’s possible this movement is determined by another universal norm, another transcendental? Maybe could be protocol.
(A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark might provide a useful take on this…)
I’m not sure where this leaves your original argument, I’ve probably strayed far, but still enough to suggest that the world online might not be deomcratic, but operates in a manner radically different from a materialistic regime.
BTW - thanks for the reference to this essay, I really enjoyed reading it, definitely has set off some thoughts!
Michael Dieter [August 24, 2005 @ 12:23 pm]
Hamacher is always worth reading. Also this brief discussion on Shirky may or may not be interesting.
I’m not a big fan of Wark’s, his segue from being a supporter of Mark Latham and defending the WTO to playing the role of ‘hacker’ ideologue has never really appealed.
If you want to explore something of the ambivalences at play here, I would always recommend Augusto Illuminati’s “Unrepresentable Citizenship” in Virno and Hardt (eds) Radical thought in Italy.
s0metim3s [August 24, 2005 @ 3:28 pm]