The field of value and the collective beast

1. The bicephalous conception of value in Marx. Some authors argue that in Marx (1867) we find a bicephalous conception of value. In his interesting book More Heat than Light, for instance, Mirowski (1989) shows how Marx drew from two models common to the science of his time to describe the arcane of the genesis of value. In Marx, there would appear — so to speak — a thermodynamic measure of value and a gravitational measure of value, a measure inspired by Carnot and a measure inspired by Newton, a metric one and a topological one, one based on horsepower and the other on the field of forces, one based on working time and the other on socially necessary labour, a more substantial one and a more relational one. Clearly none of the two models fits perfectly the flesh of living labour: the issue is still debated today and we are still struggling within it like in a straitjacket. How to measure economic value and in particular labour surplus value? There is no easy consensus about the answer to this crucial question. Interestingly, the innovative rupture represented by the Foucauldian biopolitics was, according to Deleuze (1986), the introduction of power as a field of forces, as an abstract social machine that replaced the old models of power and political economy based on the industrial thermodynamic machines. In an interview with Negri, Deleuze (1990) once noticed how a model of machine is at the same time a model of society:

Each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine — with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don’t explain anything, you have to analyze the collective apparatuses of which the machines are just one component.

Addressing both the fields of media theory and Marxism, my basic question is: which model of machine do we unconsciously apply to our view of society and our understanding of value? Let’s go back to Marx’s ambivalence. Although the ambivalence of the Marxian text is true, and each reading of the scientific subtext of philosophy always fascinating, it is not from the perspective of hard sciences that we should start reading political economy or discuss the nature of  technology or value. One of the mistakes of Mirowski (and its companion Georgescu-Roegen, pioneer of the school of degrowth) is to believe that there is always a scientific model secretly influencing economic theory. In general, from the point of view of the political method, Marx must not be read as a grammar book to dogmatically describe social struggles a posteriori, but on the contrary to understand how social struggles have shaped Marx’s own concepts from within.

2. The Western tradition of the measurability of the Being. The problem of the substance of the value is also, philosophically and politically, the problem of its measure. We could say that mathematics and economics exist precisely because there is always something that escapes measurability. Political economy is but the attempt to domesticate excess, to come to terms with surplus and capture it. Capitalism have been trying to control the substance of living labor by applying, in different ages, different devices of measurement. These measuring machines are the machines of Deleuze of Guattari that we always forget to cite, that is themachines of the second disjunctive synthesis of recording, or registration machines, that cut the flow of desiring production and inscribe codes and numbers to extract the surplus value of flow. Marx himself is said to belong to the very Western and Aristotelian tradition of the measurability of the Being for his attempt to scientifically calculate surplus value (Hardt and Negri 2000: 355).  However, Marx’s formulas are not formulas of economic equilibrium, but on the contrary formulas that, going beyond Hegelian logic, show the inherent asymmetry of capital and try to identify its internal crisis, its disproportion, its dismeasure, as in the case of the famous formula of the law of the falling rate of profit (Marx 1894). There are schools of Marxism, like Autonomist Marxism, that do not believe in Marx’s idea of an objective crisis of capital and address a subjective crisis of capital. Italian operaismo, for instance, has been always underlining the autonomy of labour against the autonomy of capital. It was the excess of the social body, the dismeasure of living labor, that set the industrial revolution out of joint, that generated the global historic ‘trauma’ of the October revolution, that pushed the evolution of capitalism towards post-Fordism, the information revolution and finance capitalism. What capital attempts to measure, monitor and capture is precisely the collective power of value generation.

3. The status of political economy in five contemporary schools of thought. On the question of measure and dismeasure — to make few conceptual jokes — we could divide the contemporary interpretations of political economy into five schools of thought: puritans, clock-watchers, autonomists, swingers, accelerationists. Puritansare those who do not study economy and specifically Marxian economic concepts for the fear to commit the sin of ‘economicism’ (Badiou) or those who recognise economic disciplines as a mere reincarnation of the old Christian theology from whose damnation no escape seems possible (Agamben). In a hypothetical ‘right-wing’ we could count the clock-watchers, loyal comrades to the supposed inherent rationality of economy, which calculate surplus-value watch in hand and only within the factory walls and in this way they calculate also rights and wages for workers (mostly orthodox Marxists). On the other hand, since the ‘60s the autonomistsrecognise the excess of living labor beyond any measurement of economic rationality, the entire metropolis as a productive space and the self-determination of subjectivities before any codified right (that is operaismo and Autonomist Marxism in general). The swingers are those who, today more than ever, support a monetarist turn in Marxism, the hegemony of the circulation of money over production, the reduction of value to price and the continuous loop between labour and money (partially Harvey, chartalists and circuitists, etc..). In a hypothetical ‘left-wing’, finally, we find the post-modern accelerationists which forecast the end of capitalism in its hypertrophic explosion (Deleuze and Guattari themselves in few passages, Baudrillard’s catastrophism, Virilio’s dromology, some authors of the recent journal Collapse, and also operaismo itself can be considered within the accelerationist family for its notion of antagonistic tendency).

4. Gattungswesen: Marx’s collective beast emerges again. So far I  tried to summarise: the questions of value, measure and excess, that all together compose the problem of the collective power and affecting also the definition of ‘the common’. As presented in Commonwealth by Hardt and Negri (2009), the notion of ‘the common’ is originated within the crisis of Marx’s measure of value and within the problem of the very unit of such a measure. The production of the social factory, the metropolis as an expanded productive space, is said to be out of measure and Time can no longer be the unit of measure of such a production (Hardt and Negri 2009: 317). Hardt e Negri then go back to the Marxian idea of capital as an accumulation of social relations and they call ‘the common’ such a production of social relation that is subsequently captured by capital. In the 1844 manuscripts the young Marx (1932) introduced a similar (yet controversial) idea:Gattungswesen, the human as a species-being. The species-being is the main feature of the human for its social nature or, if you prefer, for its dimension of political animal. As Nick Dyer‐Witheford (2004) reminds, the concept ofGattungswesen emerges in Marx from the concept of alienation and it has been criticised for being too much humanist or naturalist (nevertheless it is right here that Marx states “Nature is man’s inorganic body”). Today we could re-elaborate and adopt Gattungswesen as a concept of post-humanism, homologous with Foucault’s field of forces, Deleuze and Guattari’s body-without-organs (who found inspiration also in this passage), and the becoming machinic of the multitude. We could embrace Gattungswesen as the concept of a social monster, yet of a monster facing the future and not emerging from of an unconscious principle of nature.Similarly the idea of the common attempts to show the collective beast at the centre of contemporary capitalism under the form of a species-being, but as a species-being to be constructed, not already given. Specific apparatuses of measure, control and capture are necessary to domesticate such a beast. Evoked the social monster, we have to understand how capital is able to capture such a net of relations, such a field of forces, how it is able to impose today a number to the collective beast.

For a topology of the field of value: the new apparatuses of ranking and rating.

5. Topological models of the field of value. New empirical models of valorisation (that is another name for Deleuze and Guattari’s registration machines) must be introduced to understand the metamorphoses of capital under the pressure of the social forces of the last decades. Also following Foucault, Deleuze e Guattari, I propose to describe the field of economic forces in a topological and not in aquantitative way as orthodox political economy and clock-watchers still do. The institutions of ranking and rating are apparatuses used to measure the field of value, but of course also to control and capture the field of social relations that produce this very value. I propose here four examples: the reference economy of the university, the attention economy of the internet, the prestige economy of the art world and the geopolitical influence of international rating agencies. They all function as networks of valorisation, as multi-armed giant octopuses immersed in the waters of different oceans. For reason of clarity I suggest to distinguish between ranking, that is a machinic and objective form of measure, and rating, that is a political and subjective form of measure, but actually all these models can be considered different  incarnation of the same machinic diagram of the social field.

6. Distinction between ‘machinic’ ranking and ‘political’ rating. By ranking I mean a position in a certain range according to an objective procedure, a method, an algorithm (as it happens in the evaluation of academic journals, in the results of the Google search engine or in the calculation of the number of followers on Facebook and Twitter). By rating I mean the position along a scale according to a system of subjective assessments, based on recognition, trust and support by persons with whom a complex network of relations  has been established (see the art world and especially the international rating agencies, which offer their assessments to investors within a fabric of pure political relations and monstrous conflicts of interest). We define the first diagram as machinic because it implies the use of codified procedures, and the second diagram as political because it implies the ancient political art of building consensus, trust and social alliances on the basis of informal relations. Actually both cases are machinic systems, according to the definition of Deleuze and Guattari, as they mix automatisms with social relations. Similarly to Marx (1867), where machinery always occupies the abstract relations of a previous division of labour, some ranking algorithms happen to beformally installed on previous informal structures of rating (see also how social media map, translate and accelerate our real social relations).

7. Distinction between social networks and institutional apparatuses. What I want to highlight as much as possible is the whole social field of the collective beast, that is the extended, fluid and manifold space of the metropolis. Obviously, the global digital network and its social media are the best example to illustrate the giant network for the production and registration of valorising social relations. On a smaller scale, but with a significant economic impact, we can introduce the case of the art world that it is also based on networks that are informal, fluid, non-hierarchical and not necessarily institutional. This mesh of social relations constitutes also the substance of institutions that are apparently granitic: if universities and rating agencies show all the rigidity of institutional hierarchies and political power, their ontological constitution is not so different from that of the metropolis: they are in other words a condensation of social relations.

Model 1). The reference economy of university: an example of institutional and machinic mediation. It was in the German university of the end of the 19th century where a ranking system for academic publications was introduced by tracing and calculating the number and the matrix of bibliographic citations. More citations, the greater the ‘academic’ importance of a given text (this model will be also the inspiration of Google’s PageRank algorithm). As it is well known, every university researcher today is still captured in this measuring apparatus that determines her/his career and her/his gradient of competition. This ranking system crosses and shape universities also on a global scale: along with other indexes, it is also used to measure their ‘prestige’  and their ‘global value’. As you know, especially reading the recent Anglo-American chronicles, such a network of valorisation has a deep impact on the social status of a given university, on the tuition fees and thereafter directly on student debt. Student debt could be defined as the reversal of the cognitive pyramid of ranking, reproducing its segmentations and economic hierarchies like in a mirror.

Model 2). The attention economy of the internet: an example of social and machinic mediation. The algorithm of the search engine Google was born applying the old German model used to ‘measure’ academic publications to each document of the web hypertext. Basically Google’s PageRank algorithm automatically calculates the ‘value’ of each web link and decides the importance and visibility of a given document depending on the number and quality of links pointing to it. Google’s PageRank algorithm can be taken as the most empirical diagram of the accumulation of value in cognitive capitalism (see Pasquinelli 2009, 2011) and as an accumulator of thatvalorising information that already Alquati (1963) traced at work in the cybernetic factory of Olivetti. More in general, internet today finally shows its whole dimension of ‘social production’ in the attention economy of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, where in a similar way to Google’s PageRank algorithm the personal prestige is calculated precisely on the basis of number of ‘likes’ and ‘followers’.

Model 3). The prestige economy of the art world: an example of social and political mediation. At closer inspection, the attention economy that the internet has made visible has always been at the heart of the spectacular economy of mass media and especially of the art world. The work of art functions today as a unique irreproducible signifier whose value is accumulated and measured within a complex social matrix. In this network of valorisation surrounding the artwork very codified roles are connected to each other: authors, curators, critics, gallerists, collectors, exhibitions, magazines, museums and eventually the audience. It is enough to browse the main art journals to see how contemporary art is a careful social engineering more concerned about the delicate hierarchy of name dropping that aesthetic issues. Compared to the impassive algorithms of digital networks and the rigid university indexes, the art world, like all the spectacular world of commodities, is organised around vortices of valorisation that appear much more fluid and informal.

Model 4). The trust economy of rating agencies: an example of institutional and political mediation. At a geopolitical level the rating agencies show mechanisms very similar to those that we have tried to explain at other scales. From the recent chronicles of the global crisis we see that the fate of public debt is in the hands of private rating agencies, the armed wing of giant financial interests, that in this way influence the destiny of entire countries. We could say that the political and institutional apparatuses engineered by these organisations represent most clearly the machinic substrate of the economy of debt, since the degree of speculation on debt depends on the amount of trust that is numerically assigned to a given company or country. Moreover it is the media amplification of the rating announcements from this agencies (AAA, AA, A+, etc.) and the related mass hysteria, that makes these agencies machines of political and biopolitical governances. These agencies are clearly private actors but their influence plays across the public sphere of language and performative acts: funny enough, when they are into legal troubles and sued by some governments, they protect their rating decisions with the First Amendment of United States constitution, that is as freedom of speech.

8. (Abstract) machines always replace social machines. These rating and ranking mechanisms, as a new form of biopolitical control and production of new subjectivities and social competition, replace the traditional discipline of time of the Fordist industrial metropolis. I do not mean to introduce here an opposition between the temporal field of Fordism and the social field of post-Fordism, both being branches of the same law of surplus value, of the same machinic evolution. The paradigm of cognitive capitalism must be compared with these models of vortical accumulation, measurement and governance of social relations. As the machines described by Marx in a chapter of Capital, these measuring systems do not invent anything new, but they occupy and map a network of pre-existing social relations and behaviours. The economies of social production clearly exist well before the rating and ranking systems come to overcode, measure, control and capture them. Also the machine of debt comes to overcode these relations.

9. The factory of indebted man is cognitive and machinic. These models of ranking and rating are the same that describe, in a reverse fashion, the networks of debt of financial capitalism and keep alive the apparatuses of subjectification and competition of neoliberalism. We could say that the degree of trust measured and projected by the rating agencies run politically specular to the sense of guilt which is the basis of the debtor-creditor economic relationship (see Lazzarato 2011 on ‘the factory of the indebted man’). This new apparatuses of debt did not replace the apparatuses of cognitive capitalism, but it is a very cognitive and machinic capitalism to provide facilities and devices for the governance of debt and the measure of value. It is a cognitive and machinic capitalism that allows debt and all the tricks of financial capitalism to become pervasive and persistent, chasing us wherever we go.

References

Alquati, Romano (1963). “Composizione organica del capitale e forza-lavoro alla Olivetti”. Quaderni Rossi, n. 3, 1963.

Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Foucault. Paris: Minuit.

Deleuze, Gilles (1990) ‘Le devenir révolutionnaire et les créations politiques’. Interview with Antonio Negri. Futur Antérieur, n. 1, 1990. As ‘Contrôle et devenir’ in: Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972-1990. Paris, Minuit, 1990. Translation: ‘Control and Becoming’. In: Negotiations 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Deleuze, Gilles e Guattari, Félix (1972). L’Anti-Oedipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Vol. 1. Paris: Minuit.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick (2004). “1844/2004/2044: The Return of Species-Being”.Historical Materialism, vol. 12, n. 4, 2004.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Lazzarato, Maurizio (2011). La Fabrique de l’homme endetté: essai sur la condition néolibérale. Paris: Édition Amsterdam.

Marx, Karl (1932). Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844. In: Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA1), Berlin.

Marx, Karl (1867). Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Vol. 1. Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner.

Marx, Karl (1894). Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Vol. 3. Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner.

Mirowski, Philip (1989). More Heat than Light. Economics as social physics: Physics as nature’s economics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Pasquinelli, Matteo (2009). “Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect”. In: Konrad Becker, Felix Stalder (eds), Deep Search, London: Transaction Publishers: 2009. Online: matteopasquinelli.com/docs/Pasquinelli_PageRank.pdf

Pasquinelli, Matteo (2011). “Capitalismo macchinico e plusvalore di rete: note sull’economia politica della macchina di Turing”. Uninomade, novembre 2011. Online: uninomade.org/capitalismo-macchinico