°Capitalism as cult
A blockquote post, an excerpt from Werner Hamacher’s “Guilt History Benjamin’s Sketch ‘Capitalism as Religion’” - Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002) - while I recover from glandular and finish some writing.
[…] That which is “already recognizable in the present in the religious structure of capitalism” is shown by Benjamin in three features—and a fourth that lies in the unrecognizability of its God.
The first feature of capitalism is that it is a pure cult religion, “perhaps the most extreme that has ever existed,” in which everything, though without any special dogmas or theology, “only has meaning with immediate reference to the cult.” The capital-religious structure guarantees an immediacy of meaning, of value and its source, an immediate relation to its God, which assigns a rating in the salvation economy to every stance taken and every action undertaken and permits no one to leave the nexus of value and meaning installed by its rituals. The obsessive attribution of an economic index to every detail of conduct—according to the scales of capital and salvation—turns this structure into a cult of meaning that is “extreme” in terms of both its universality and intensity. It is a cult of the “immediate” significance of everyday activities, a cult in which every individual is not only the means but is also, as means, already an end, a purpose, a value, and a meaning. Benjamin describes this immediate relation to the God Capital as “the concretion” of the cult [GS 6: 100]. Means and ends, action and meaning, money and God, are “grown together” in this “concretion” to constitute a closed complex of semantic transaction. Everything that has meaning is immediately identical with what it means; the sign is immediately the signified and its referent. Since the realm of means has been thus deleted and substituted with that of immediate ends, this rite without transcendence permits only the pure presence of what it inscribes. Temporal distances are just as excluded as semiotic differences between the elements of this cult of meaning. The immediate presence, however, that is in concreto actualized with every move in this cult is that of a lack—of a debt and of guilt.
Benjamin emphasizes, as the second feature of the capitalist rite, its “permanent duration.” Since every relation between secular act and salvation-historical significance [End Page 87] has been contracted into the single point of their immediate copresence, the rites of the salvation business offer an image of the undifferentiated duration of the present. “Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans trêve et sans merci. There is no ‘weekday,’ no day that would not be a holiday in the terrifying sense of the unfolding of all of its sacral pomp, of the most extreme tension of the worshipper” [GS 6: 100].4
[…] Capitalism’s ever-lasting Sunday is the perennial workday of surplus value and surplus labor. The time of capital, thus characterized, extends the end of history into the dead eternity of surplus time. In the time of capital, there is no “now” that might not be simultaneous with any other “now”; there is no “now” that would not be intent upon its return in another, none that would not itself stand under the law of returns and appear as the mere revenant of another “now.” This means, however, that the time of capital is the time of the dead “now” as its own second coming as revenue and surplus, as re-now and over-now. It is the automatic time of a homogenous continuum, of which Benjamin says in “Fate and Character” it is “improperly temporal.” Every “now” owes itself another “now” and owes itself to another “now.” And it itself is meanwhile only a deficient “now,” replicating itself in yet another “now” that is equally deficient. This formula of a “now” owing to another “now” characterizes not only capital time and the time of the Capital Christian epoch, but the philosophical conception of time in the epoch from [End Page 89] Aristotle to Hegel and beyond: it describes the negativity of the “now” that is now already past and passed on into another. And just as the time of this epoch is “improperly temporal,” its history is improperly historical, frozen in the reproduction of the ever-unchanging schema of debt and debt-increasing compensations, consisting in the “paradoxical relaxation of a dead Sunday.”
Capitalism is not only a cult and a permanent cult of immediacy; it is both of these, both cult and permanent, only because it functions by accruing guilt. This is the third and the decisive trait, emphasized by Benjamin in the essentially religious structure of this economic form and life form. He writes: “Capitalism is probably the first case of a cult that produces guilt rather than atonement. In this respect, its religious system exists in the downfall of a monstrous movement. A monstrous consciousness of guilt, unable to find atonement, reaches for the cult not to find atonement, but rather to make the guilt universal—to hammer it into the conscious mind and finally and above all to include God Himself in this guilt, so as to finally interest Him in atonement” [GS 6: 100-01]. With this trait of the religion of capital, that it produces, accumulates, and universalizes guilt, the fusion now emerges with greater clarity, of its economic, juridical—and to this extent moral—and psychological aspects. Benjamin himself points to fusion as an aspect existing within the concept of Schuld itself, at the point when he speaks of the “demonic ambiguity of this concept” [GS 6: 102]. It is the ambiguity, namely, by which financial debts (Schulden) always serve as an index of legal, moral, and affective guilt (Schuld)—and by which every guilt manifests itself in debts, and every debt in guilt. This ambiguity is demonic, like all ambiguity for Benjamin, because it offers the vague sign of something undecided or undifferentiated, with respect to which man has not yet secured his freedom—freedom lying in decision alone—and in which he therefore leaves himself at the mercy of the forces of provenance and succession, the domination of etio-economic descendancy. In the “demonic ambiguity” of Schuld and Verschuldung, the concept of guilt itself attests to the guilt that it should designate, and thus continually begets itself.
Under the conditions of the capital- and guilt religion, there is no liberation. And thus it is all the more decisive for Benjamin’s analysis that the extent and the logic of this fusion be determined: the logic that provides for the turbulences around the hollow center of this religion. […]
