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this cult of continuity, the confident assumption of knowing to whom and to what we owe our existence - whence the importance of the idea of ‘origins’ – Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”

What passes for legal tender is a convention for the reckoning of debts – and a legalised violence steps in where convention falters.

Without “the guarantee of power,” as Mark Osteen puts it, “counterfeit and genuine currency are identical.” Following Georg Simmel and Jean-Joseph Goux, Osteen goes on to note that “the money economy depends upon a form of faith or credit in the authenticity and power of the existing political order, a supranational standard that resembles both the ‘aura’ surrounding original art and religious faith” (1992: 828). Osteen is concerned with the formal concurrence of literary and economic values, as is Will Fisher in his treatment of the etymological proximity of “queer sex” to “queer money,” their shared connotations of counterfeit and forgery. Fisher, for his part, notes that “unnatural sexualities and unnatural economies were coded through each other” (1999:15), though mostly alludes to the productivism that, in political economy, has long served to define what is natural and, therefore, to specify the line between fake and real. More formally, in his commodity exchange theory of the law Evgeny Pashukanis put this problematic in terms of the continual re-foundation, through violence, of the legal form of value. “Legal obligation,” he wrote, can find no independent validity and wavers interminably between two extremes: subjection to external coercion, and ‘free’ moral duty” (2007: 165). In its schematics, this echoes Walter Benjamin’s argument in his “Critique of Violence,” elaborated since in various ways by Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe and others. There, the problem is that of a periodic swing, in Benjamin’s words, between law-making and law-preserving violence. Put together, these understandings point to the eminent questions of political economy, not least those of exchange as the form of relation, of productivity as its premise and promise, of the subjective homologies of marital, wage, social and fiduciary contracts. In discussions of the most recent financial meltdown, these questions appear as the crisis of value’s foundation, most remarkably in the calls for greater regulation and denunciations of unproductive excess (Cooper and Mitropoulos, 2009). That said, if a formal analysis of the dynamic that characterises the move to legal violence threatens to slide from a description of the indistinction between the rule of law and the state of exception to political indifference (notable in Agamben’s claim that we are all, potentially, homo sacer), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s insistence on the “productive dimension” they consider as fundamental to their politics tends to cast “constituent power as an undisputed origin” (Neilson, 2004: 77). It is this positing of a seemingly unchallenged origin (of value) – or, better: the attempt at its definition and reinscription, and in the midst I would argue of its deepest contestation and uncertainty – which begins to explain the differentia specifica of the turn to a legitimated (if not strictly legal) violence, or what is at stake. Not quite the tragic dispersal of control or loss, nor the triumphal advance of the multitude’s productive capacities, the innovations in forms of control that translate identification into right – and, thereby, both the possibility of its revocation or the reckoning of its lack, as Wendy Brown (1993) argued – pivot on the transformation of contingency into necessity. In one respect, this is the generation of quantitative value from qualitative ones. But the labour theory of right (and the labour theory of value that stalks it) that understands this through the conflation of contingency and labour, resolves complex and irreducible flows into the figural claims of original creation. To pose this as a problem of the transformation of labour into labour-power presupposes that it is possible to know what labour is before and beyond the encounter with the machinery of its quantification. It secures the shaken confidence of knowing – as a matter of the distribution of the wage, in the very definition of legitimate labour in its distinction from slavery, in the explanation of quantitative outcomes according to the qualities humans are said to possess, naturally – to whom and to what we owe our existence. All of which is by no means to suggest that there are not tragedies (just as innovation by no means indicates the accomplishment of prior forms of control), though they might well complicate rather than assure relations of indebtedness, identity and filiation.