Capitalism and God (or what if the UFOs never arrive?)

“Capital is dead,” McKenzie Wark told me during our recent conversation for the Diet Soap podcast. “And we killed it.”

Wark’s new book “The Beach Beneath the Street” is a prequel to his 2004 detourned text “The Hacker Manifesto.” A social history of the Situationist International (a Marxist band of revolutionary hooligans who got started in the France of the 1950s) his book traces the development of what aimed to be revolutionary ideas. However, what moved McKenzie to paraphrase Neitzche’s Madman allegory was not the SI but the simple and central fact of our present moment.

The Economic crisis of 2008 demonstrated that there was no such thing as Capital. Our collective project since Lehman Brother’s collapse has been to paper over this basic fact.

“Whither is God?” [Neitzche's Madman] cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”

In order to understand our predicament, in order to fathom Wark’s position in relation to Capital, it is important to realize that a dead God is often more pervasive, more diffuse, and more repressive than a living God. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo he describes how the idea of the dead father is the repressive force of authority in civilization. Freud argues that patricide is literally our foundational primal scene. Later on Zizek would clarify that this patricide only seemed real to Freud because it is a necessary pre-requisite for patriarchial authority. It’s necessary precisely because patriarchal authority is always spectral, symbolic, or imaginary.

There is always a madman in the marketplace. Understanding this, understanding that value or God is always already dead, that both are most effective when taken to be illusions, Wark’s next move becomes comprehensible.

In my recent conversation with Professor McKenzie Wark he first declared that Capital or value was dead, and then he proceeded to run away from it.

“Maybe there was an opportunity and the icons were the Paris Commune through May 1968, but we didn’t take the turn. Whether there really was a possible transformation or the illusion of it, either way we missed it. So the question is, what is the relationship between the struggles internal to the totality that is Capital on the one hand, and the relationship of that totality to another totality that is external to it? What is the relationship between Capitalism and nature not as a thing, but as an externality.”

Wark’s desire for an external intervention and his abandonment of internal space reminded me of nothing other than Stephen Speilberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That is, just as Roy Neary needed an external force to save him from his suburban nightmare, McKenzie the theorist seemed to require a UFO. But, I can’t really blame him for this.

In the 90s I too turned to the UFO as an icon of hope. The UFO was the ultimate externality. In the early 90s I would frequently take psychedelic drugs and imagine the day when saucers would land on the White House lawn. I thought that the current Capitalist nightmare might be punctured by a visit from little green men. They’d show themselves on television and then I’d be free. But, what I didn’t understand was that UFO already fit neatly into the current system.

Lacan is famous for saying that Woman does not exist, and by that he meant that woman as the pre-symbolic object of complete and authentic being did not exist. Well, flying saucers do not exist either.

The current reality that gives shape to our everyday lives is a fantasy, and as such it defines every externality in advance. To put it even more directly, something that does not exist does not have interiority. Conversely something that does not exist has nothing external to it.

Let’s reconsider Neitzsche’s Madman:

If God is dead, or if Capitalism relies on the production of a value that is just a convenient way for us to measure the exploitation of one class of people by another, then we are charged with the task of creating new games and new rituals of atonement. But, what we’ve discovered since Neitzsche’s time is that killing God is easy, in fact its preordained and necessary. The trick is convincing God of his own death, the trick is to transform all of our iPads into objects that realize how the value they appear to contain is only a spectre or a mystification.

Producing such a God, such an iPad, might require a revolution.