3

What is

Technology, capital and the medium determine the universal topography of life in the world. These three universal entities are inseparable; they form a single yet differentiated universal. A universal is a non-thing-like, unlimited and illimitable generality, which as pure movement makes specific things possible. The universal in this sense constitutes a precondition of the human being within the universal topography.

I.e. as the production of possibilities, the TCM universal is the production of things.

I.e. all forms of cultural production (academia, education, the arts/entertainment) are only possible within the universal of TCM.

I.e. all forms of cultural destruction (such as war) are only possible within the universal of TCM. Destruction is a mode of production.¹

I.e. all forms of politics are only possible within the universal of TCM. A politics that would seek to authentically politicize the TCM universal is impossible. In order to do so, it would not only have to locate an ‘outside’ of the universal, but also turn this outside into the political goal of a given community. It would thereby run into the aporia of having to mobilize the TCM universal’s own instruments in the service of its abolition. The politics of the TCM universal is a pragma-politics.

The mobility of people, commodities, money and information is only possible within the universal of TCM.

Although the first universal – the TCM universal – unfolds within mathematico-technological space, the second universal, science, is only possible within the first. The first universal integrates and extegrates the second.

The third universal, the human being, is only possible within the first and second. The second universal integrates and extegrates the third. The presentation of the universal significance of the human being is only possible insofar as the emergence of this significance has been determined by TCM and science. At issue here is then not the biological provenance of an animal that has evolved into homo sapiens by way of homo erectus.

I.e. a universal conception of the human (anthropology) is only possible within the universal of TCM.

I.e. all scientific (medical) systematizations of this universal understanding are only possible within the universal of TCM.

I.e. all of the questions addressed by applied ethics (medical ethics, ecological ethics, business ethics, animal ethics, and so on) are only possible within the universal of TCM.

Human beings come back to themselves in intimacy, i.e. through a breach in their self-interpretation as emancipated universal subjects. Intimacy is not in the world. In it, there is the possibility of loss. The event of intimacy is a temporary liberation from the TCM universal. This does not mean that it can rupture the first universal itself.

It is only in passing through the first three universals that the fourth universal, nature, becomes possible. At the same time, the first three universals are only possible through nature. The fourth universal integrates and extegrates the third universal, the human being. Since human beings are highly intelligent and dispose of a body, they both belong and (for the very same reason) do not belong to nature.

‘Possible’ here means that the universal of TCM is absolute possibility. It is only in the universal of TCM that we are capable of anything; any other kind of capability (if it is not to be found in the sphere of intimacy) is impossible. It follows that all things are only possible in the TCM universal. The TCM universal is the ‘possest’.²

I.e. before/behind/above/under everything that appears, everything that exists, lies technology, capital and the medium (in the TCM universal, nothing appears without economic reason. Money is the prime matter – Aristotle’s prōtē hylē).

Since it is only in the TCM universal that everything is possible and that much is actualized, then it is also only in the TCM universal that everything is actual. What for the TCM universal is not actual is simply not yet actual (such as the possible-necessary Mars expedition).

The MTT thus includes the actual as well as the possible. The transition from the possible to the actual proceeds exclusively via the channels of the TCM universal – in other words: the world and its reality is organized by TCM. The order of things depends on the way in which it is generated by TCM. Nothing in this order can exist or appear without having been made possible in a technological, economic and media-based manner.

Since nothing can exist or appear that has not been made possible by TCM, the world is also defined by this universal. Beyond the universal of TCM, there is nothing – or rather, beyond the TCM universal (and only beyond it) there is only the nothing. In this regard, death – understood in its intimacy as always my own, inevitable loss of everything – is not something that exists within the TCM universal. Death as the biological demise of an individual being, on the other hand, is only possible within the TCM universal.

As absolute possibility, the TCM universal is absolute necessity. If it is only in the TCM universal that everything is possible, then this possibility is a necessity. As absolute possibility, the TCM universal would even exist without human beings. Yet since absolute possibility contains the possibility of the human being, qua intelligence, within itself – since the conjunction of the PT, the MTT and the I-M-M implies intelligence – the emergence of the human being is determined from the outset. For insofar as absolute possibility unfolds in space and time – insofar as the I-M-M represents a specific actualization of this absolute possibility within the continuity of space and time – this unfolding can only take place how it has taken place, does take place, and will take place.

Philosophical statements are always also intimate statements. They therefore indicate the only freedom there is within and from the TCM universal. Today more than ever, freedom is the true mystery.

What is, is the universal of TCM.

Universality as such, however, is – the universal.

3.1 Technology

At the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition, Aristotle defined technology (technē)³ in two important statements.⁴ It is first described as a ‘reasoned state of capacity to make’ (hexis meta logou poiētikē) concerned with ‘coming into being’ (genesis), i.e. with ‘contriving and considering’ (technazein kai theōrein) that which is ‘capable of either being or not being’. Its origin (archē) thus lies ‘in the maker and not in the thing made’. Since it is a capacity that belongs to thinking beings in particular, it is what Aristotle terms a dianoetic virtue.

The other important observation is that technology, just like nature (phusis), is a form of genesis. Nature and technology both serve to bring forth things and human beings. An important difference here, however, is that in nature things and human beings are generated autonomously or in virtue of themselves [von selbst], whereas technological production necessarily has to presuppose the thought and activity of the producer. The crucial point is nonetheless that technology, as a capacity possessed by thinking, planning beings, would seem to be directly linked to a central natural principle. To put it crudely: where both technology and nature are concerned, it is a question of things and human beings being possible, becoming actual, and being able to be actual.

Aristotle himself was already able to appeal to a branch of knowledge that in principle comprehends the connection between thought and nature. This link – this intersection, as it were – is determined within the MTT. The initial mathematization of nature was not heavily oriented toward its technological domination, which the Greeks had been able to study among the Egyptians. The MTT initially served to enrich the contemplation of nature, rather than to facilitate its regulation. In the Timaeus, for example, Plato assigns the most beautiful geometrical bodies (kallista sōmata) to the different kinds of matter.⁵ Yet the very fact that the unconditional intersection of nature and mathematics has become thinkable here means that the inversion of the PT and the MTT is already underway.

Thinking is constituted by the intertwining of the PT and the MTT in the space-time of the I-M-M. Since in the TCM complex this intertwining involves a drive toward production, technology implies the setting of ends. There is, to borrow Kant’s formulation, a teleologia rationis humanae⁶ that posits the theoretical and practical goals that are to be realized within and beyond nature. Nature as a whole becomes an object of contemplation and cultivation, since it is in nature that theory and praxis can intervene absolutely. Technology here proves to be the power of conceiving and realizing goals.

In order to generate material production, thinking in the MTT produces goals. The rationality and thus the subjectivity of technology consists in a form of subjective teleology. This teleology involves a process of increasing perfection that – unlike the moral sphere – does not have an ultimate end. Technology is endless. Its endlessness, its illimitability, is one of its strengths. On account of this orientation toward goals, the movement of technological production can be interpreted as endless progress. Progress – the paradigmatic temporality and historicity of the world. Production is never simply generation; production always seeks to optimize a given process so as to improve the ratio between cause (energy invested) and effect (the product). Production is progress.

According to the teleology of nature, technology constitutes progress toward perfection, or progressive perfection. This is also how we usually experience it in our technologically organized day-to-day lives. This is due to the fact that particular technologies are continually updated.⁷ Yet it is not only technology that is experienced in this way. Technological development is an indicator of determinate historical progress as such. It is technology alone that indicates we are ‘more advanced’ (better informed, more emancipated, freer, etc.) today than in the seventeenth century. Insofar as it narrates events as a progressive series of advances, history is therefore technology.⁸ This serves to distinguish technology from nature, for although the latter evolves, it also revolves, or circulates, within itself. Though his account is not unproblematic, Aristotle was nonetheless right that both technology and nature are forms of generation. Unlike natural things (plants, animals, humans), however, technological and historical objects are not subject to a process of loss and deterioration that ends in death.

This is related to the fact that technology, unlike nature, does not generate individuals. Technology produces varying copies of an innovative model. The deterioration of technological objects is therefore an intrinsic aspect of technological progress. It is factored in from the outset, for only that which ages and deteriorates can progress, i.e. be innovative. Progress requires deterioration. The same does not hold for natural things. Generational change cannot be compared with the progression from one model to the next. Although knowledge, like technology, also progresses, and although twenty-first-century human life is not organized as it was in previous centuries, the finitude of life remains unfathomable. Death remains an irresolvable mystery. It connects us to every human being who has ever lived and who ever will live.

The technological object is a serially manufactured copy and therefore in principle consumable and replaceable. Just as its deterioration is factored in from the outset, its eventual replacement is also anticipated. Without deterioration and replacement, there would be no technological object. This nonetheless complicates the linear movement of technological progression, which is now seen to be accompanied by a form of circulation. Deterioration and replacement imply a process of re-cycling in a broad sense. The movement of technological progression comes to be complicated insofar as the linear inversion of the PT and the MTT is linked to a circular movement. What results is a spiral. The movement of circulation progresses to ever more advanced levels. The technological object is replaced by the same object within a new production series. In experiential terms, circularity is overshadowed by linearity. Replacing a technological object with the same object amounts to technological stagnation and frustrates the subject. In reality, however, replacement never takes place in this way: what is new is always more advanced.

The technological object par excellence is the machine – the very symbol of movement, the universal object. In the form of a motor, the machine circulates internally while moving in a linear-vectorial, goal-directed manner. The motor-machine, however, is the technological object not only because it is the first ‘inanimate’ object that seems to move by itself [von selbst], i.e. automatically, but also because the advent of the motor represents the very emergence of the technological object as such. We shall later return to this point.

As a form of genesis, technology is always movement – the primary movement of a world whose glittering and dazzling products leave nature in the shade. As a form of production, it brings things forth from a state of withdrawal and concealedness. As the creation of the new, it is a linear movement – a genuinely vectorial movement, since it has both direction and a certain intensity, i.e. a significant magnitude or measurable force. The vectorial power of technology, however, not only consists in the production of the new, but also in its movement of increasing perfection toward the new. In the context of the model-copy relationship, the technological object is always subject to this movement. This is attested to by its seriality, by the dialectic of quantity and quality. In the inversion of the PT and the MTT, the technological vector not only has direction and magnitude, but also a magnitude that is continually intensified via the movement of increasing perfection.

At this point it is necessary to consider the phenomenon or concept of movement more closely. Movement is first of all the movement of a body in space, i.e. movement as a change of place. As Aristotle also noted, it is through the movement of bodies through space that movement becomes an indicator of time. Since my birth, then, the movement of my body – a movement impossible without technological objects – has served to indicate time in space. The movement of bodies in time provides the basis for the interlacing of hi-stories in history [Geflecht der Geschichten in der Geschichte]. The movement of bodies is therefore temporal insofar as the history of hi-stories [Geschichten-Geschichte] is based upon it. This movement is always linked to technological innovation. It is an intrinsic element of the MTT.

Technological movement is primary both because it constitutes the very emergence of things in the field of human activity and because it produces the history of hi-stories. Marx’s philosophy of history thus contains an important truth. Even if we cannot subscribe to the view that class struggle is the motor of history, it remains true that the production of technological objects not only serves as a benchmark for historiography, but also de facto determines the reality of historical progress.

This is due to the MTT’s range of possibilities. In the mathematico-technological matrix of actuality, there is a necessity to the course of technological invention. The history of the production of technological objects begins in prehistory, i.e. at a time when only the most primitive objects existed. Very quickly, however, technological possibilities were actualized that scarcely differ from our own. The pyramids of Giza, like the computer, also had to be invented. And where the pyramid is possible, the computer is necessarily possible too. The role of the individual subject in this inventive sphere is almost negligible. The invention of the telephone is the paradigm of technological invention. Alongside Reis and Bell, many other potential inventors also played a part in its development over the course of three or four decades. In essence, the same is true of every invention. What matters is not that Konrad Zuse was the first to build a computer, but that the computer was built at all. Had Zuse not invented it, someone else would have. All such developments, however, presuppose the absolute possibility of technology.

In the history of technology, then, the importance of the individual is generally overestimated. The individual responds to the determinate inventive possibilities of her time by actualizing them. Indeed, she ‘finds’ something that was already there.⁹ The inventor’s ‘genius’ consists in a resolute practice of technological combination. Now and then, this resolution manifests itself in the form of personal courage, when the invention in question – the X-ray, for example – requires the inventor to put her own body at stake. Nevertheless, the invention of a technological object cannot be compared to the production of a work of art.

Progress is an aspect of a normalization process realized via the subject. The topographies of Auschwitz, Kolyma and Hiroshima all recall a moment of progress that triggered an interference in the MTT’s normalization. An interference between technological progress and the normalization of the subject always arises when such progress too greatly exceeds the subject’s normalized habitualities. It cannot be avoided. The crimes of Auschwitz, Kolyma and Hiroshima indicate a subject outstripped by the progress of technology. The subject here became nothing but the object of technology, and the freedom of intimacy was entirely absorbed by technology. This is not to reduce these crimes to technology, but to recall the immanent role that technology played within them. Later we shall discuss the evil that called for and promoted this technological integration. These crimes were not only technologically realized; prior to their realization, their feasibility was also technologically calculated. But humanity has now learned. Interferences between technology and normality constitute regular milestones in the process of the normalization of the subject. The last event to border on such an interference was the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown.

The meaning of technology in history can be gauged by means of a number of threshold situations in the course of the inversion of the double topology. Threshold situations are situations in which something manifests itself. What this means is that, in the first threshold situation, the technological object – or rather technology itself – manifests itself for the first time. It does not mean that technology first comes into being here. Technology is absolute possibility insofar as it makes possible the human being as a thinking being. The human being (intelligence) and technology are equiprimordial. If technology has always already existed, there is nonetheless a long latency period before it first comes to light. This latency period¹⁰ lasts until the beginning of the modern era.

In the world of the Middle Ages, technology, or rather the technological object, does not manifest itself as such. This is due to the PT, or rather to the importance of Christianity and the Christian Church. In the Middle Ages, technology facilitates daily life but is not thematized as such. To be sure, technological equipment – such as that used to treat plague – was sometimes found to be inadequate. Yet the Christian interpretation of phenomena remained dominant, as was attested to by the identification of technology with worldly curiosity or magic.

Technological objects first came to pose a question for the Church – and thus for the world of the Middle Ages as a whole – when natural scientists began to use them to verify their hypotheses. The life of Galileo offers an example here. The Church was quite able to acknowledge the Copernican hypothesis that the earth revolves around the sun. It was only when it became possible to verify such hypotheses that the Inquisition was galvanized into action. Galileo was able to make use of the telescope, invented in Holland in 1608, and for him the Copernican teaching was no longer simply a hypothesis. The technological object manifested itself here in the form of the telescope. Christianity’s decline and, as Max Weber put it, the ‘disenchantment of the world’ had begun.

Technology’s transition from its latency to its manifest state constitutes its public-ation. Technology becomes public insofar as it hesitantly yet nonetheless decisively establishes a public domain in the fifteenth century. In revolutionizing the printing process, Gutenberg laid a new foundation for the production of books. It is not insignificant that the first technological threshold situation, the moment at which technology first manifests itself, coincides with the establishment of the public domain. Ever since, the latter has always had to presuppose its technological conditions of production. Insofar as the true origin of the public domain lies in technological production, it is tainted in a way that it will never be able to overcome. For its horizon is necessarily formed by the capital at work in any production process. The TCM universal begins to take shape.

The emergence of technology from its latency is accompanied by another development. In the wake of Descartes, the doctor Julien Offray de la Mettrie writes his L’homme machine, which offers an entirely mechanical conception of the human being. La Mettrie’s crucial contention is that the ‘soul’s faculties depend […] on the specific organization of the brain and of the whole body’.¹¹ In polemic fashion, he adds that ‘the soul is merely a vain term of which we have no idea and which a good mind should use only to refer to that part of us which thinks’. One of the key discoveries of the modern era is then that the ‘soul’ refers to something that should in fact be termed the ‘brain’ – another catastrophe for religion.

From this point on, the second universal, science, begins to emancipate itself from religion and philosophy. While the latter becomes absorbed in metaphysical system building, a form of natural science develops, by way of the mid-nineteenth-century Materialismusstreit,¹² that increasingly draws the consequences outlined by La Mettrie. First among these is that the soul has now been replaced by the brain as the centre of subjectivity. The natural sciences sound the death knell for the metaphysico-religious definition of the human being. Since this time, matter alone has been the focus of the natural sciences’ attention. Even in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, meaningful propositions are restricted to those of the natural sciences. This is because the text wholly subscribes to the MTT – only in order to intimate in closing, however, that what is truly important is the metaphysical atopia of the One, that restricting thought to the MTT is ultimately impossible or ‘senseless’.¹³ Here would be the place for an excursus discussing how technology does not take possession of language as logic, but is always already bound up with logic (and mathematics).

The next threshold situation (each builds on the last) is the Industrial Revolution – the emergence of ‘large-scale industry’ facilitated by heavy machinery and the ‘world market’.¹⁴ Here the machine not only begins to organize the appearance of the work world, but also that of the lifeworld. The steam engine and then the internal combustion engine increase mobility on land, water, and in the air. Now it is not just Christianity that seems to lose its role in organizing the world: the Industrial Revolution and its agents, the bourgeoisie, have ‘left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’.¹⁵ What comes to the fore here is a process of normalization that amounts to the neutralization of any metaphysical orientation of life – whether religious, moral, or poetic. Following the first assault on religion, on Christianity, it represents the next stage in the disenchantment of the world.

The significance of the Industrial Revolution is not merely incidental; it affects the lifeworld itself. It is the crucible of those functional frameworks that structure the life of the modern subject: the mobility made possible by technological objects (and through which the universal topography begins to emerge); the social status likewise rendered possible by such objects; and the competitive processes rooted in the dialectic of mobility and status. These functional frameworks, which are constitutive of the subject as such, give rise to an indifference that first remains latent but then increasingly comes to determine the structure of social life. In the wake of two world wars, this indifference has become normalized.

The third threshold situation is formed by these world wars, in which technology’s destructive potential first manifests itself in the form of attrition warfare. The First World War shakes the very foundations of a European society that believes itself to be progressing in all areas of life. Science and technology were supposed to be merely the guarantors of this progress. Nietzsche, who took a different view, was a figure who until the war primarily appealed to artists. Following this rupture, however, he came to be regarded as a philosopher who had made a decisive contribution to the history of philosophy.

The First World War serves to turn a military experience into a technological and thus cultural experience. The soldier becomes a function of the machine. This function consists in serving the machine appropriately, i.e. perfectly, i.e. in a machine-like manner. Technology takes precedence over individual engagement. The victor is simply whoever has the better materiel. The lessons of this experience are not restricted to the theatre of war, but begin to exert an influence on everyday life. The experience of the war gives rise to works such as Ernst Jünger’s The Worker and Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Experience and Poverty’.¹⁶

It was Jünger who, in thinking through the First World War and its consequences, coined the phrase, ‘total mobilization’.¹⁷ Modern technology ‘mobilizes’ all aspects of life and the world. Through the development of nuclear physics it penetrates to the atomic and the subatomic levels. Through innovations in psychology it touches on dreams and the unconscious. Through medical advances it makes the body transparent. As everything (people, raw materials, commodities, money) begins to move more quickly, spatio-temporal distances contract. Jünger’s characterization of technology as ‘total mobilization’, i.e. his conception of the essence of technology as the totalizing event of an offensive movement, has been enormously significant for the philosophy of culture, technology and media.

Yet Jünger’s concept of ‘total mobilization’ also brings something else into play: it marks the birth of a performative contradiction to which critical thinking on technology, capital and the medium is condemned within the MTT. All such critical reflection on the TCM universal is undermined by the fact that it can only be realized through the universal itself. Jünger himself avoids this contradiction insofar as he uses the term ‘total mobilization’ in an affirmative rather than a critical manner. Unlike Heidegger, he was aware of the difficulty here.

The Second World War forms a dividing line. What distinguishes it is that it represents the last time the PT calamitously seeks to rise up against its repression. Antisemitism in particular represents the hypertrophy of an essentially mythical worldview – one that obstinately insists on orienting an increasingly rational world around a pseudo-rational racial narrative. The crimes that spring from this opposition to the establishment of a universal topography lead, after the end of the war, to the further loss of the PT’s significance. Auschwitz makes any national and cultural self-assertion suspicious and ultimately impossible.

The fourth and (provisionally) final threshold situation can be split into two related developments. The first is the invention of the computer, which, as Friedrich Kittler notes, was itself made possible by the mathematical discovery of the Turing machine. The second is the discovery of cyberspace (the internet) made possible by the computer. With the advent of cyberspace the virtual sphere acquires a boundless presence. Furthermore, it becomes evident here that technology is a medium. Everything can be communicated, and in the same way. Indifference thereby becomes further entrenched in the subject’s relation to the world.

Technology is a medium in the sense that the medium is a midpoint, an ‘interspace’ that regulates the order of things. What makes technology a medium is then its instrumental character. That technology has an instrumental appearance, however, does not mean that it is an instrument. As the absolute possibility that is absolute necessity, it cannot be such. It nonetheless manifests itself in the form of tools that facilitate or thwart their own existence or that of other objects (in the widest sense). The ontological status of the order of things is modified by the fact that it is made possible by such media. The Aristotelian distinction between being and non-being retains its validity here. We are aware of the extent to which technology, capital and the medium regulate the order of things by enabling the existence of some things and preventing that of others. Yet we do not know what it is for them to do so. Unlike Aristotle, we do not understand the meaning of this process. The cosmos – this beautiful order – has vanished.

The order of these four threshold situations is no less necessary than the inherence within them of that which took place in antiquity and the Middle Ages. A determined chain of interrelated inventions forms a progressive advance that turns its cheerleaders into its agents. The mathematico-technological interconnectedness of these inventions suggests that every link in this chain remains in proximity to a point at which all of these progressive steps are gathered. Though separated by more than 4000 years, the pyramid and the computer, for example, remain in proximity to each other through their relation to this point. For the MTT, space-time is a variable, i.e. relative quantity. Time can be measured and counted in intervals. Yet the determinations that are the preconditions of progress escape time. For these determinations, measurement is irrelevant.

The movement of technology – an internal circulation that is at the same time a linear-vectorial, progressive advance within the mathematico-technological topography – is the movement of history. Nothing any longer escapes this movement of ‘total mobilization’. As this movement, technology is absolute possibility, the necessity of movement. If this is the nature of technology, then we cannot read Aristotle’s original definition of technology as a ‘reasoned state of capacity to make’ as stating that human beings are free to decide whether or not to act technologically. Human beings can exert their technological control over beings, but they cannot exert their control over technology.

If, insofar as progress is technologically realized, the MTT determines the course of history, then it is not only the customary interpretation of history that begins to falter. Is history not then the ‘progress of the consciousness of freedom’?¹⁸ Certainly. Yet in the MTT, the ‘consciousness of freedom’ is a con-sequence of technological progress. The ‘total mobilization’ of technology, capital and the medium requires a free, responsible, universal subject. There is an internal, non-contingent affinity between the pyramids and the slave society of antiquity on the one hand, and cyberspace and the society of emancipated subjects on the other. History in the form of a narrative – of ‘providence’, for example, or ‘messianism’ – is lost in the course of the inversion of the PT and the MTT.

Technology was once integrated into the world of the PT; now, the world is integrated into the technology of the MTT. Integration is a purely technical concept. It belongs to the MTT. Needless to say, language too becomes technical through the inversion of the PT and the MTT.

As a form of movement, technology opens on to capital¹⁹ and the medium, just as capital and the medium open on to technology. This is because all three constitute one coplanar movement, which is the absolute possibility. There is thus an intrinsic connection between these three elements of what is always one movement.²⁰

3.2 Capital

The period between the first and second technological threshold situations saw the publication of a book that laid the foundations of modern economics: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s theory of capital is of fundamental importance. All subsequent delineations of the concept are indebted to it. In order to understand the movement of capital in the process of ‘total mobilization’ – i.e. how capital itself becomes total mobilization and how total mobilization becomes capital – it is from this theory that we need to set out.

Crucial discussions of capital are to be found in the second book of Smith’s work, entitled ‘Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock’. In the following we shall be concerned only with certain essential properties of capital – properties to which economics continually returns even as it later distances itself from them through its increasing complexity. One of these qualities is capital’s capacity for ‘growth’. In the first book, Smith formulates this in the following manner: ‘Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have got a little, it is easy to get more.’²¹ He calls this ‘the accumulation of capital’. It is the central phenomenon of the mathematico-technological topology of capital.

The growth of money is measured in terms of ‘revenue’. Capital is that part of the stock possessed by someone ‘which, he expects, is to afford him this revenue’.²² The other part is ‘that which supplies his immediate consumption’, i.e. that which is needed in order to live (food, clothing, furniture, etc.). Capital is thus always regarded from the perspective of growth, i.e. in terms of the oscillation between income and expenditure through which it is intensified. Capital is essentially growth.

It is on this basis that Smith draws a distinction between ‘circulating capital’ and ‘fixed capital’. Circulation is the true movement of profit, of growth: ‘[the merchant’s] capital is continually going from him in one shape, and returning to him in another.’ Intrinsic to the mobility of capital is its manifestation in various forms – those of ‘circulating capital’, ‘machines’ and ‘instruments of trade’. ‘Fixed capital’ is invested in the improvement of land, the purchase of machines, and so on. Smith’s distinction is ultimately unsatisfactory, however, since fixed capital also indirectly enters circulation. Smith clearly had certain occupations in mind that lent the distinction an air of necessity. The ‘merchant’, for instance, only deals with circulating capital, since he does not need any machines. For the factory owner, however, the relation between ‘fixed’ and ‘circulating’ capital only leads to a new form of ‘circulating’ capital. In truth, capital circulates per se.

Capital is an internally circulating, linear-vectorial movement that regulates and represents values – i.e. quantities that transform into qualities. This is also how it is conceived by Marx, for whom ‘the general formula of capital is M-C-M’.²³ Money is invested in commodities and returns as more money. Circulation consists in a labour process in which the worker’s activity lends the product a surplus value, resulting in capital growth. Wage labour is integral to Marx’s conception of capital; it is such labour that generates growth.

It is by no means the case, however, that Marx simply determines capital in terms of labour. Even if capital without wage labour is inconceivable (and even if it remains so today in the economy as a whole), capital still retains a general priority over labour. It is ‘no longer the labourer that employs the means of production’ but rather ‘the means of production that employ the labourer’.²⁴ These ‘means of production’ are not ‘consumed by’ the labourer as ‘material elements of his productive activity’, but rather ‘consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life process’. Marx thus concludes that ‘the life process of capital consists only in its movement as value constantly expanding [sich selbst verwertender Wert]’.²⁵ Yet here Marx does not seek to uncouple capital from wage labour. Capital, in its very movement, remains dependent on labour. It nonetheless integrates labour into its own movement.

So begins a process that will have devastating consequences in the present age of the TCM universal. The problem concerns the source of the ‘form of value’²⁶ of labour. It must be possible to decide on the value of a given task. This value depends on the kind of labour involved, the nature of the resultant product, and the societal demand for it. Furthermore, it is necessary to presuppose the basic equality of all labourers. Should a large part of the labour with respect to the totality of all tasks be carried out by slaves, there would be no universal criterion according to which labour could be valued.

This criterion was lost in the second half of the last century. Though no new system of slavery emerged (at least not officially), the movement of capital since the middle of the last century led to such a division between the real economy and the financial sector that maintaining a universal criterion for the valuation of labour became impossible. Even today, of course, a purely speculative economy in which money alone produces more money is inconceivable. Wage labour remains an indispensable element of capital. Nevertheless, the relation between labour and the growth of capital, between labour and its value, has become obscure. (Were a new universal criterion of labour to be found, it would amount to something of a revolution.)

Marx’s terminological decision to speak of the ‘life process of capital’ continues the line of thought begun by Smith. Capital necessarily tends toward growth. Growth is a form of movement. This movement is thus the very capital by which it is produced. The metaphorics of capital, according to which capital is life, is then quite appropriate here. This is reinforced by Benjamin Franklin’s humorous yet nonetheless accurate remark concerning money: ‘Remember that money is of a prolific generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on.’²⁷ This identification of capital with life – or, in Franklin’s case, with time – indicates that any economic attempt to control the growth of capital (which includes ‘interest’) will have to reckon with psychologically inflected, ideological objections. To meddle with the growth of capital is to meddle with life. Capital is the lifeblood of any economy.

The metaphor of life now comes to be inscribed within another metaphor through its integration into a technological threshold situation. In the modern era, the living body becomes a machine. On the basis of his reading of Marx, Joseph Schumpeter is therefore able to modify the dominant metaphor by speaking of the ‘capitalist engine’.²⁸ This engine is set and kept ‘in motion’ by ‘the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, and the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates’. This metaphorical displacement is commensurate with the fusion of capital and technology, of growth (life) and the machine.

The matrix of technology and economics is mathematics. For Schumpeter at least, the ‘theoretical economy’ has a ‘mathematical character’.²⁹ It is a ‘quantitative science’ with ‘the possibility of strict exactitude and far-reaching deductions’. If one is ‘in principle an opponent of mathematical forms of thinking’, then one must ‘give up thinking in this area in general’. This does not mean that the real economy is mathematically controllable (in question here is the theoretical economy’).³⁰ Yet technology, capital and the medium are not merely connected to one another on account of their mathematical rationality; they are intertwined with one another. The TCM universal can only function mathematically.

It would nevertheless be a mistake to contrast the mechanical paradigm with life. Mechanization is the mechanization of life itself. Life is not thereby made less vital; it is merely transformed through a process of mathematization that is not foreign to life itself. Schumpeter does not then mix his metaphors when he speaks of the ‘organic process’ of the ‘capitalist machine’. The organic process is not a perpetuum mobile. It is fed by energy that it does not itself produce. This holds both for the machine and for living organisms. In this regard, the machine and life are intrinsically linked via the organic process of ‘creative destruction’³¹ – a further development of the economic metaphorics of growth.

Growing production is marked by growing consumption. This not only holds for industrial forms of production, but also for the growth of larger economic structures. The growth of capital always takes place through the modulatory assimilation of more capital. The linear-vectorial movement of capital requires material that it can use, as it were, to fortify itself. Capital needs capital in order to create more capital. In his Pure Theory of Capital, Friedrich August Hayek conceives this process in terms of the relation between ‘input’ and an ‘increase in output’, which latter ‘will always be due to a change in the method of production used, a technical improvement’.³² Capital realizes its potential through its investment in the perfection of production, in the form of innovation in and through technology. Technology is only possible as ‘creative destruction’.

Schumpeter’s insights are not limited to the sphere of economics, but also apply to the broader cultural and historical significance of capitalism. For Schumpeter, capitalism is the key to understanding modernity – even if he takes it to be unsuited to its further development. ‘Elementary training in rational thought and behavior’ derives from an ‘everyday economic task’, and the ‘economic pattern’ is the ‘matrix of logic’.³³ In order to support this claim, Schumpeter draws on an example that brings together technology and prehistory: a ‘“primitive” man’ uses a stick that breaks in his hand. Faced with this situation, he has the alternative of either reciting a ‘magic formula’ or repairing the stick (or finding a new one). The right response is the one that conforms to the ‘economic pattern’, i.e. to a rationality implicit in the latter that for Schumpeter is capitalistic in nature.³⁴

For Schumpeter, this is attested to by two characteristics of capitalism. First, ‘capitalist praxis turns the unit of money into a tool of rational cost-profit calculations’,³⁵ i.e. into an instrument of ‘creative destruction’. ‘Thus defined and quantified for the economic sector,’ he continues, ‘this type of logic or attitude or method starts upon its conqueror’s career’ beyond this sector, subjugating or rather rationalizing everything in its path. For Schumpeter, this becomes particularly evident at the beginning of the modern era. ‘Modern mathematico-experimental science’ emerged with the ‘rise of capitalism’, overturning the ‘fortress of scholastic thought’. The ‘rugged individualism of Galileo’ was thus the ‘individualism of the rising capitalist class’.

Furthermore, capitalism not only produced ‘the mental attitude of modern science’, but also ‘the men and the means’ corresponding to it.³⁶ Here Schumpeter gives the examples of the Augsburg merchant Jakob Fugger (‘the Rich’) and the famous banker and Renaissance patron Agostino Chigi. Capitalism, he claims, has ultimately been ‘the propelling force of the rationalization of human behavior’, which includes ‘not only the modern mechanized plant and the volume of the output that pours forth from it, not only modern technology and economic organization, but all the features and achievements of modern civilization’.³⁷

Capital is then the ‘propelling force’ of technology and its mathematico-technological rationality. On this point Schumpeter is close to Max Weber, who himself acknowledged this proximity as early as 1917. For Schumpeter too, capitalism is part of the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Yet in contrast to Weber he claims that the ‘capitalist machine’ must necessarily become a ‘socialist engine’³⁸ – an assessment that in light of the debate over the regulation of capitalism was not as far from the mark as it might seem. However that may be, the normalization of the subject is a modern form of capital-driven habitualization. But does the ‘disenchantment of the world’ have the final word? Or has the totalization of capital not cast a new spell on things? If in its growth capital rids our lives of all concern, is it not another form of magic?

If capital is an internally circulating, linear-vectorial movement that regulates and represents values – i.e. quantities that transform into qualities, then it may be time to distinguish capital from ‘capitalism’. ‘Capitalism’ would then only be one kind of economy – one that interprets capital in a particular manner. It should be clear by now that any economy – even a socialist or communist economy – is dependent on capital. In any discussion of a new kind of communism, it would then be necessary to elaborate a communist form of capital. Such a communist capital would constitute the first step toward an alternative to ‘capitalism’ – a difficult step, since a communist (i.e. anti-capitalist) conception of capital would have to depart from the ‘healthy common sense’ for which ‘capitalism’ is perfectly self-evident.

‘The life process of capital consists only in its movement as value constantly expanding [sich selbst verwertender Wert].’ In order to realize the self-referential movement noted by Marx, capital has to open on to technology. In doing so, it seemingly loses itself. Capital is always invested in something. The growth process is only an end in itself insofar as this end includes the representation of prosperity and luxury. Capital must surrender to the economic ends of prosperity production in order to return to itself enlarged.³⁹ Input and output are always oriented toward growth, even where the process comes to be concentrated in a balancing calculation. Capital as a form of movement thus becomes a medium that can never be a pure medium. Growth, rather than mediation, remains its primary function. At the same time, however, the movement of growth is mediation. Capital that manifests itself as technology is a medium.

3.3 Medium

In his On the Soul, Aristotle investigates the diversity of perception across the different senses. Perception first of all involves a duality. I see what is visible.⁴⁰ What is visible in itself is colour. What is visible in itself is the cause of its visibility. In order to understand sight, however, it is not enough simply to divide visual perception into the seer and the seen. For there is also a third term that must be taken into account. Between myself and what I see there is something transparent – there is light. What is light?

Light is transparent. It is visible, though not in itself, but in the colours of things. It first becomes visible in something that for Aristotle is not itself light. Light is only the actual being of the transparent. There is also the possibility of darkness, which Aristotle does not consider further. Light as the trans-parency of the visible necessarily fills the interval between myself and what I see. I see through this interval, perceiving, for example, the green beetle. This interval is an interspace (metaxu).⁴¹

The interspace is intermediate [in der Mitte] between the seer and the seen. As such, it mediates between the two – it overcomes the interval separating them. It is thus the medium. Yet Aristotle also makes another observation. When the interspace is emptied (of light) it is not only the clarity of sight that is impaired; in fact, nothing is seen at all. Where the medium of sight is concerned, we can then distinguish between emptiness and fullness, between the purely positive and the purely negative: without the interspace, without light, in darkness, there is no sight.

The same does not seem to hold for hearing. Where hearing is concerned, the interspace is air. This interspace must be empty in order for a sound to make it vibrate and thereby reach the ear. The difference between air and light is thus that the former is not, as it were, a kind of acoustic transparency; in order to transmit a sound, it must continually vibrate. The continuity of the medium must be ensured, and this requires it to be ‘empty’. The opposite of light is darkness. Where there is darkness, there is no light. The emptiness of light is darkness, which renders sight impossible. The emptiness of air is air itself, which renders hearing possible.

Transparency and emptiness are then decisive characteristics of the medium. The medium is the empty, transparent, and thus invisible centre [Mitte]. The medium that allows everything to appear does not itself appear. What appear are technological objects. Such objects are never themselves the centre, the medium – the MTT itself. It is the invisible permeability of the medium that, in the form of a continuous interspace, allows information, commodities, money, people, and so on, to circulate. Unlike technology and capital, the medium is not itself a form of movement, but rather the centre of all movement, the centre that mediates all movement. If technology and capital are both linear-vectorial magnitudes of movement, then they require the medium in order to be what they are. The movement of technology and capital is a mediated movement.

If the medium is empty, permeable, and thereby capable of mediating, then there can be an ontology of the medium. Like being itself, the medium is the null topology that is the precondition of any topography – including any topography of technology and capital. It is never a being [ein Seiendes]. It can therefore function as the invisible ground of both the social sphere and, above all, of a virtual sphere that fragments and channels this social sphere. Social interaction is not only influenced by this virtual or media-based sphere; it is made possible by it. Without the medium, not only would there be no production of technology and capital; there would be no production of social interaction.

Such forms of production, however, require particular media. These are not only presupposed by all forms of production, but are themselves produced. They are based on the fundamental ontological media of writing and (spoken) language. These are fundamental insofar as they constitute the possibility, i.e. the producibility, of all other media. Language is the precondition of the medium as such, the medium of the medium. (And if there is no medium without language, is the condition of the medium itself already a medium?)

The medium is not only the centre that allows technology and capital to move; it also stands in a particular relation to them. While not itself material, it is shaped by technology and capital. In the history of technology and capital, the medium always assumes a specific form that is presupposed by all modes of production. Writing and language take the form of ever more determinate and ever more important channels of production. Between human beings and their reality comes to be interposed, as Friedrich Kittler notes, a ‘network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data’.⁴² The medium produces itself in media.

For Kittler, this takes place via two waves of innovation, one around 1800, the other around 1900. The beginning of the nineteenth century sees the formation of a public intellectual sphere (reflected, for example, in the philosophical underpinnings of the new Humboldt University), which provides a platform for the philosopher or poet as author. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the invention of new storage media such as the gramophone opens up new technological possibilities. This ‘network of technologies and institutions’ is so momentous that it robs the subject of her self-conception as a truly free being. At the provisional end-point of this self-perfecting production process, the philosopher and the poet become marginal figures. They do not escape the movement through which the emancipated subject becomes an integral of a medium that enables technology and capital.

Kittler’s identification of a medium-specific threshold situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century recalls the first threshold situation in the history of technology, when Gutenberg’s invention of a movable type printing press ushered in a new epoch. At this point, technology began to emerge from a latency period spanning millennia. Technologies of world-historical significance were invented and the brain became the new centre of our understanding of the human. Successive innovations in the field of printing and an associated increase in literacy across Europe gave rise to an ever more integrative public sphere – itself an integral of the TCM universal. Marshall McLuhan emphasized the importance of this threshold situation in his 1962 work, The Gutenberg Galaxy.⁴³

In Aristotle’s account of perception, the interspace is accorded a merely mediating role between the seer and the seen. In the modern era, however, the interspace acquires a sense that had previously belonged only to the mediated terms. The medium as interspace becomes an immanent field that no longer admits any outside and that con-centrates all possible sense within itself. The interspace becomes the centre of everything. This is because the centre is no longer simply a space for the presentation or representation of information; it is a universal topography produced by technology and capital. It comes to be filled with pumping triggers and with images and sounds, as though in this way a new spell might be cast over the disenchanted world. Fantasies become three-dimensional structures made of light and air. The medium outgrows itself, and in integrating reality [Wirklichkeit] into itself gives rise to what Baudrillard calls the ‘age of simulation’.⁴⁴

Like technology, the medium is also a form of ‘total mobilization’. The function of the medium in presenting information as a virtual game of being has become so prevalent that it is scarcely possible for anything to appear outside this function. The medium no longer goes unobserved; it actively presents itself along with what it conveys: the hardware becomes a fetish. McLuhan’s statement that ‘the medium is the message’⁴⁵ (a statement in which either the subject or the object can be emphasized) merits particular attention here. And yet, although the medium presents itself along with what it conveys (above all, along with capital, which it implies) – although there is a ‘media world’ – the medium as a thing does not exist. Even when it presents itself along with what it conveys, it withdraws from view.

The more crucial point, however, is that the medium – itself technologically produced – produces presence. It is a permanent presence machine. This presence constitutes the space in which the indifferent, normalized subject lives. Not only does it join the subject to itself and provide for her every need; the subject is also only able to see herself as she appears in the medium. The simulated-simulating world-topography of the medium is a universal lifeworld. This lifeworld consists in pure presentation, and thus has no real past or future. The subject forgets forgetting and delegates memory to the medium, to the storage facility: now, everything is now.

Technology and capital need the medium in order to disseminate and channel their movement. This movement manifests itself in the production of technological objects. Among these objects, the internet is particularly significant, since it is the technological object that best conceals its object-like character. The ontological status of this network is unstable, obscure, full of holes, a haven for hackers – a veil that even conceals itself. Nothing presents the medium better than this medium. More than anything else, this inter, this net, is the formless form: the invisible centre of being.

Kittler also emphasizes the importance of the Turing machine. This algorithm-based computational model, invented by Alan Turing in 1936 on the basis of Hilbert’s program, forms the precondition of the computer. The medium of all media consists in the movement of the MTT. The invisible centre of being is mathematico-technologically organized. The idea that the medium is a formless form thus only corresponds to our immediate perception of things. The hacker of course knows better. She relies on the fact that perception does not penetrate the surface of the medium. Those who only observe the medium remain wholly at its mercy. Yet those who claim to know its inner workings do not escape it either. This is because even the mathematico-technological organization of the medium is incapable of accounting for the interspace that reveals itself to the informed observer.

The MTT furnishes the topography of TCM. This topography is determined by the triad of technology.capital.medium – a triad in which each term’s function can be assumed by either of the others. Technology and capital do not use the medium to realize their ends. They are themselves media. The medium as the invisible centre of being in turn simulates the (Aristotelian) elements only insofar as it represents itself in the form of specific technologies. Capital, for its part, is always and everywhere a possibility.

What TCM makes possible is a movement in which a world unfolds that is precisely organized by this very movement. This movement is universal, which is what allows us to speak of a TCM universal. It is an internally circulating, linear-vectorial movement oriented toward increasing perfection, growth and presence. Within the MTT, the TCM conjunction forms a coplanar structure. In the space-time of the I-M-M, this structure constitutes the unified interconnection of three vectors on one plane. Continually passing into one another, they form one intensive event.

I.e.:

Technology and capital are the medium –

the medium and technology are capital –

capital and the medium are technology –

are the TCM universal.

3.4 The TCM universal (Universal I)

The TCM universal is the first universal, the universal that integrates and extegrates the three subsequent universals. Everything that takes place, takes place in the TCM universal.

The TCM universal is the absolute possibility and thus absolute necessity of production. All of the subsequent universals are productive universals – universals subject to the conditions determined by the first universal. These conditions are not arbitrary; they are derived from the mathematico-vectorial topography of the MTT.

The TCM universal is not contingently given. There is no world without or beyond this universal. The defining significance of the MTT is that the TCM universal has to exist. The TCM universal conditions all forms of universalization. Everything that proves to be universalizable, including human rights, is effectively an epiphenomenon of the TCM universal. In the absence of the spatio-temporal unification of the earth, any universal claim would be problematic. Only after this unification has taken place can a universal claim be justified.

The MTT’s TCM in the I-M-M is absolute possibility. Absolute possibility means necessity. Possibility is always the possibility of one thing among others. Yet the MTT’s TCM in the I-M-M is the source of determinations that present themselves as a relative series of events within the spatio-temporal continuum. Contingency is inconceivable. The inconceivable, however, does not exist in the MTT. In the world, therefore, everything is conceivable.

The TCM universal is ranked in first place in the register of reality. What would have to be asked here is whether the intensity of reality is quantifiable. If so, there would not only be the real and the unreal, but also the more real.⁴⁶ Among the determining factors of the subject’s life in the world, the TCM universal exhibits the highest reality, since it shapes this world.

It is to Spinoza that we owe the non-verifiable hypothesis of the absolutely determined character of being. Human praxis is just as causally determined as all other natural processes. In the topography of the MTT, nature and the TCM universal are co-extensive. Everything that occurs in the TCM universal does so as absolute possibility that is in the process of becoming necessity. Possibility is organized in an ontic manner by the MTT. Human beings can know nothing of absolute determination (wherein even probability is determined). Yet this too is no coincidence; it itself is determined. So, moreover, is the fact that human beings neither can nor wish to gain any scientific understanding of the absolutely determined character of all being.

In all possible worlds, there is a repetition of what has occurred and what will occur in the TCM universal. There is no other world, and there can be no other world, in which the TCM universal has not taken over the organization of the earth. There is no nature that has not already been integrated into the TCM universal. There is no culture that is not presented by the TCM universal. There is no intelligent lifeform that does not realize itself through the products of this universal. Even ‘God’, were he only to have acted once, must have been an intelligent demiurge of the universal.

Production is the signature of the universal. No place exists beyond production. Human beings have no real choice over whether to affirm or negate production. Affirmation is the natural choice, since it is demanded and encouraged by the TCM universal through its process of normalization. Negation leads to a loss of productivity. In concrete terms, it manifests itself as traumatization and marginalization. In philosophy it attains its rational form. Later we shall discuss its impossibility, for the negation of the TCM universal is the impossible.

The TCM universal is organized by the MTT in the I-M-M. This means that production, as the form of this organization, is already a category of the MTT. Everything that takes place can be formalized; everything already has a mathematical and technological form. In its manifestation, however, production itself has already detached itself from such formalizations. Manifest production or produced manifestation emerges as an event comprised of many events. The TCM universal is the one unifying event of the universal topography of the world.

The TCM universal is the world, the world-form, or even the world formula. It is the world as the inconceivable yet determined totality of all facts and non-facts. It is the world-form, not in contrast to a world-content or matter, but rather in the mode of self-thinking thought that is form and content at the same time. The universal produces itself in theory and praxis. Its determinations include, as discussed, a form of intelligence that raises itself to the level of thinking. And it is the world formula insofar as U = TCM is the form of the world inscribed in intelligence.

Technology is on the one hand a reason-governed, creative capacity; on the other, it is a form of second nature. From both perspectives – i.e. those of the mover and the moved – technology appears as an internally circulating, linear-vectorial movement that presents the intensification of a quantity into a quality in the drive toward perfection.

Capital is a ‘movement as value constantly expanding [sich selbst verwertender Wert]’, a ‘capitalist machine’ realized in the form of ‘creative destruction’. The movement of capital is an internally circulating, linear-vectorial progression, wherein the vector not only has magnitude and direction but also a magnitude that is raised to a higher power through its growth – a quantity that transforms into a quality.

The medium is the interspace that, without (in) itself appearing, makes appearance possible. In the modern era, the interspace becomes the centre of all movement, drawing everything inside itself. It gathers, stores, saves – mediates. The medium provides an empty space for the circulating, linear-vectorial movement of technology and capital.

As production, the TCM universal repels itself from its products. It can be found everywhere, since it manifests itself everywhere and determines everything. It can be characterized as a phase of the inversion of the PT and the MTT, a phase marked by the continual dissemination of determinations. The TCM universal is thus temporally constituted, and appears in the form of a discrete quantity of events, corresponding to the continuity and con-sequence of the determinations of the MTT. The unfolding of the TCM universal as the inversion of the PT and the MTT is time, which is narrated as history.

Nevertheless, the TCM universal is not universality itself; the MTT and the PT themselves advert to a topology that withdraws from the TCM universal. There is an overabundance of universality that can no longer be presented in any topography. The TCM universal marks a limit at which the first atopia begins – the unprethinkable overdetermination of the One, the uni-versal of all universals.

3.4.1 The scientific universal (Universal II)

‘All men by nature desire to know [eidenai].’⁴⁷ This is evident just from the fact that they love the senses even apart from their usefulness. Among the senses, however, they privilege sight, since it provides the most knowledge and reveals the greatest number of differences between things. Science and technology (epistēmē kai technē), for Aristotle, are rooted in experience (empeiria). Theory, however – the pure contemplation of beings – is a higher form of knowledge than such experiential, useful knowledge, since it has its end in itself. The fact that the contemplation of the highest being – the divine – affords the philosopher an unsurpassable bliss indicates the extent of the difference between these two forms of knowledge.

This Aristotelian conception of knowledge gives rise to certain problems that continue to pose a challenge today. The natural sciences presuppose a knowledge of real things that can be verified or falsified via methodical testing in the space-time of the MTT. This notion of testability gives rise to the hypothesis-led experiment, a procedure unknown to Aristotle. Such experiments are able to deliver results of great clarity, since their experimental design can be strictly controlled. Mathematics is never the object of such sciences, but it necessarily forms the background to them. Both the measurements taken and the technologies used in experiments at least presuppose the field of engineering. The employment of technologies stems from the TCM universal. The function of mathematics as a form of presentation of the MTT thus loses its independence. It is placed in the service of the TCM universal.

Insofar as this form of natural science, which focuses on measurable realities, comes to be regarded as science [Wissenschaft]⁴⁸ as such, that which Aristotle conceived under the heading of theory becomes unscientific. Unlike the modern notion of theory, Aristotle’s is by no means dependent on the idea of verification in the domain of things. The philosopher contemplates the highest being – the divine – as pure actuality, without being obliged to experimentally or empirically substantiate such thinking. The claims of empirical knowledge are not thereby rejected, but rather confined to certain limits.

The natural sciences are therefore based on certain preliminary ontological decisions. Since the only research results they recognize are those that are universally testable, they are ultimately concerned with objects, i.e. with mass (matter). Sciences that do not study quantifiable objects – those that are concerned with concepts instead of objects, for example – thus come to be viewed with suspicion. As a result, even those sciences whose relation to their objects may be ontologically problematic (such as psychology) increasingly tend to adopt quantitative methods or to exclude more questionable areas of research. (In this way, they contribute to the replacement of the soul by the brain and the repression of psychoanalysis.) The MTT excludes the PT from the world-form.

Regarded from this perspective, technology, capital and the medium are not objects of a real science. They are mere concepts, and although in their universality they always designate particular objects, they themselves operate at the level of language. Though in this linguistic context they may be considered from various perspectives, it is less a question here of considering their relevance in the world than of formally defining them in relation to other linguistic phenomena. This of course does not mean that the fields of technology, capital and media are not objects of scientific inquiry; on the contrary, they are (now) essentially the only objects of such inquiry. Yet technology as a subject area is something other than the technology that has its absolute presentation within the TCM universal. The reality of TCM is no mere linguistic phenomenon. It is the universal that manifests itself topographically.

Experiments are always conducted under particular conditions, which need to be taken into account in interpreting their results. This is important in understanding Newtonian classical mechanics, for instance, which only remains valid under the exclusion of the relativity of space and time and changes in the mass of objects. The scientific universal does not consist in a particular unifying theory, but in a certain form or methodology. What distinguishes this notion of science from Aristotelian theory is that the latter is not a pure method, but rather the unity of method and object, form and content. The philosopher thinks thinking.

This places very specific demands on the sciences. First, any science that aims to be a neutral form of knowledge must organize its objects. In Europe, this has been achieved since the Middle Ages through the establishment of universities. The production of the university represents a great leap forward in the development of the sciences. Whether or not we consider the modern university against the backdrop of the Platonic Academy – a possible precursor – its objective from the outset has been to ensure the freedom of scientific inquiry – a freedom represented in the Middle Ages by a relative independence from the Church.

Science in the strict sense has only existed since the first threshold situation of the TCM universal at the beginning of the modern era. The inversion of the double topology takes place here as the MTT comes to dominate the PT. Nature is mathematized by the experimental sciences. The idea of nature as an ens creatum fades ever further into the background.

Science is a form of methodical inquiry that produces verifiable and falsifiable knowledge. This verifiability and falsifiability is dependent on methods that are universally valid. Since Plato’s conception of matter, if not since Pythagoras, mathematics has made possible the formalization and universalization of knowledge. Although the notion of a mathesis universalis only emerged in the modern era (with Descartes and Leibniz), mathematics and universality are linked in principle. Mathematical universality is the only form of universality that can be presupposed a priori.

The problem of the role of theory in the scientific universal manifests itself in the relation between the Egyptian and Greek (or Babylonian) conceptions of mathematics. Both of these conceptions involve universality, yet they differ with regard to their application. Whereas the Egyptians tended to use mathematics in everyday calculations (involving wages, grain quantities in baking, planimetrics), the Greeks primarily took a theoretical interest in mathematics. They learned from the Egyptians. Herodotus states, for example, that it was the Egyptians who invented the arts of land measurement and geometry.⁴⁹ According to Diogenes Laertius, Pythagoras must therefore have visited Egypt.⁵⁰ For the Greeks, however, mathematics was an element of philosophy in a way that it was not for the Egyptians.

According to a once widespread view, philosophy is the origin of all science and thus the science of sciences. This view remained influential for a long time. Only with the advent of the industrial revolution and the associated rise of the natural sciences did a rift appear between science and philosophy – a rift that has subsequently cast the entire history of philosophy in a new light. It is the preeminence of theory in philosophy that indicates the extent to which the natural sciences, concerned from the outset with the concrete understanding of beings, are driven by an originally unphilosophical motivation.

Philosophy, along with theoretical mathematics (for example), constitutes an extreme form of knowledge that cannot be integrated. It is atopical, i.e. non-localizable within a universal generality, within an operative order. This atopicality is both its strength and its weakness. Philosophy is free, yet for that very reason also powerless – for the TCM universal insinuates itself into any possible application of philosophy, thus annihilating philosophy’s freedom. The same holds for any form of thinking that finds its meaning within itself.

The maxim of ‘freedom in research and teaching’ is necessarily bound up with the idea of the university, and is still held to apply today. And yet such freedom is increasingly questionable not only where the TCM universal’s conditions of production penetrate ever deeper into the organization of the university, but also where the survival or the establishment of the university can only be guaranteed using the means of this universal. Even here, of course the maxim of freedom in research and teaching remains unviolated. Yet the university is now primarily a place of production, where freedom is the freedom to produce knowledge and to have to produce knowledge.

In a certain sense, all production is unfree simply insofar as something has to be produced at all. The injunction to produce, which was perhaps not inherent to the university from the outset, pulls the university – and therefore science – into the vortex of TCM. Science becomes TCM science. The natural sciences in particular are then forced to develop technologies to facilitate their research. Scientific inquiry that is organized and institutionalized in this way comes to be drawn into the circular-linear-vectorial movement of capital. This first of all means that research results become the obligatory goal of all inquiry. But this is not all. One of the ultimate con-sequences of the TCM universal is that a split develops between a qualitative and a quantitative conception of research results. There is now quality-science on the one hand and quantity-science on the other. One is responsible for cutting-edge research, the other for mass education. One ensures the realization of the TCM universal among the elite, the other its realization among the wider population.

It may well be that academics conceive their disciplines as forms of theory and would wish to distinguish their projects from those undertaken in the classical sites of (industrial) production. It may also be that the associated international research communities have a strongly theoretical orientation. All of this, however, still serves production, i.e. the institution of the university in its subjection to the TCM universal. In truth, then, ‘freedom in research and teaching’ amounts to the universal affirmation of the absolute possibility – or rather necessity – of production.

Science is the site of the I-M-M’s formation in the MTT. This gives rise to a form of knowledge that is integrated into the TCM universal. The TCM universal is reflected in this knowledge. This reflection is essential for the TCM universal, and provides it with a confirmation of the inversion of the double topology. It gives the universal a clearer conception of itself, which further enhances its great stability.

In concrete terms, what this means is that the TCM universal uses the process of reflection to organize its production dynamics. For reflection allows the TCM universal to recognize itself in its products. These products (ranging from those of the PT to those of the MTT) are not simply things, but recognized things. What manifests itself in such things is the innovation necessary to the TCM universal. In the scientific universal, the TCM universal comes back to itself.

This universal of TCM science is the world-brain – the decision hub of production. This is why it is the second universal, the direct con-sequence of technology.capital.medium. The absolute possibility that is TCM comes to be determined here as an inescapable universal network.

3.4.2 The human universal (Universal III)

The human being, like everything else, is a thing of the MTT in the I-M-M. The organization of this thing differs only in degree from the organization of other things, particularly the animal. Human beings are distinguished by their level of intelligence. Quantity here gives way to quality: the human being is more complex and therefore other than the animal. This is due to the manner of the I-M-M’s determination. In the human organism, the relation between the idea and matter that has developed in the space-time of the MTT reaches a particular intensity.

The human universal consists first of all in a particular biological determination, in a specific mode of embodiment, which forms the basis for all its further universal attributes. As with the other universals, these attributes effect the inversion of the PT and the MTT. In the prehistory of the human universal, the law still called for poetic determinations. With the proclamation of an idea of the human, however, the pragmatism of the TCM universal was arrived at. The ascription of emancipatory, universal rights to the universal subject wholly accords with the TCM world-form.

The biological determination of the human being manifests itself in experience: the recognition of the human being at first sight – this is the empirical indicator of the universal. To recognize a human being as such at first sight is to identify her through her appearance. What appears here is the human being as a body, as a human body. This appearance is not a secondary phenomenon of the human as such, but rather its precondition.

The biological self-evidence of this body is so clear that the question of whether it is ‘really’ a human being that I see is irrelevant. Wherever this self-evidence is denied, there are always ideological presuppositions at work. The Spanish and Portuguese conquerors of South America, for example, had no difficulty in identifying the continent’s indigenous peoples as human beings. The colonialists’ mass murder was accompanied by their procreation with the wives of those killed. Their difficulty was rather to justify – before themselves and before ‘God’ – the manifest otherness of these human beings, especially the otherness of their particular corporeality.

The notion of biological self-evidence is ambiguous. Whether the layman could recognize the difference between the innards of a pig and those of a human being is doubtful. Nevertheless, the initial identification of the human being remains guided by the self-evident presupposition of the body, which already implies its functions. We know that humans and animals become hungry and thirsty and have sexual needs. Yet we also know that there are means of expressing such needs that are unknown to animals.

The self-evidence of this human appearance – of the human body – is bound up with language. The human body is a linguistic body. Zarathustra, for example (speaking through his mouthpiece, Nietzsche), refers to ‘our sense’ as a ‘parable of our body’.⁵¹ ‘Sense’ is to be understood here both as sensibility and as an ‘end’. Yet sense and sensibility are not simply identified with the lived body [Leib]; they are rather the ‘parable’ of this body. The lived body signifies that which speaks to us in our sense and sensibility. It signifies: human being. The lived body – as the parabolic origin of language. Animals have bodies [haben Körper], but not a lived body [Leib].

Seeing such a lived body is a linguistic event. The lived body refers to itself in its distinctive affective movement insofar as it is in this self-relation that it first appears as a human body. This self-relation manifests itself in the form of intelligible and thus interpretable gestures and gesticulations. Such corporeal self-relatedness is an expression of intimacy. It indicates that the body enters into a relation with the external world and thus with its own appearance. Shame is therefore a universal bodily gesture. To recognize a human body at first sight, then, is to ‘read’ this intimate self-relation. When one body encounters another, a conversation ensues even before a single word has been spoken. This conversation is not added to these bodies as a form of external sense; it is parabolically intrinsic to every body.

Language is a sign of high intelligence. Rooted in the UT, or rather in the double topology, intelligence requires determinations consisting of poetically or mathematico-technologically presented meanings. The determined character of thought and action presupposes intelligence. This link between determination and intelligence also holds where animals are concerned. In addition, there is a mode of determination that even applies to non-intelligent objects such as stones. On this basis, stones would then also be intelligent.

It remains to consider a further and crucially important element of the human universal. The body has an intimate relation to itself, and this self-relation accompanies its every appearance. Yet it is not limited to this self-relation. The body also relates to others and to other things. It pursues other objects in order, one way or another, to appropriate them. Appropriation here ranges from merely taking hold of them, through explicitly and destructively marking one’s possession of them, to absorbing or ingesting them. This is Eros, the conatus, appetitus, desire, or whatever else one may wish to call this striving.

Desire and need are the bodily characteristics that first make the human being a true universal. Desire affects the human being at a universal level by interacting with the (productive) movement of the TCM universal. There is an unprethinkable relation between the human being’s universal desire and the movement of the TCM universal. The human being desires production. The TCM universal takes advantage of this. It makes the human being its universal vehicle. The first universal is borne, as it were, by its desirous subjects, and this allows it to actualize what is possible with absolute necessity.

In her desire and need, the human being directly experiences herself as universal. The universal topography of the MTT reveals itself in hunger, thirst and the sexual drives. Insofar as the universal human being traverses this universal topography without experiencing other human beings as a genuine limit, all forms of racism prove to be absurd. Despite all of the concrete differences between bodies, human beings have one common body.

The human being, or rather the human body, is a specific determination of the I-M-M. The attempt to understand this structure has a long history. During technology’s latency period it was hindered by religiously motivated prohibitions. It was only at the beginning of the modern era – this first threshold situation in the history of technology – that it became possible to dissect corpses. When La Mettrie announced the replacement of the soul by the brain, yet nonetheless had to admit that very little was known about the latter, this was because the threshold had only just been crossed and research on the human body was still in its infancy. In 1620, William Harvey discovered, or rather explained, the circulation of the blood, a feat made possible by the prior invention of the microscope.

The discovery of a universal human anatomy is a key moment in the history of the human universal. The technological object that represents this anatomical structure is the tomograph. It is the culmination of the modern drive to penetrate the human body, since it allows an object to be studied without damaging it. The human machine thus succeeds in building a machine that illuminates its own machinelike character. Before the tomograph, everyone is equal.

It is not only from a medical perspective, however, that this machine-machine relation serves to determine the human being as a universal. The anatomical penetration of the anthropogenic material structure localizes the human being within the MTT. Medicine and anatomy are only consequences of this underlying localization, which testifies to a crucial affinity between the TCM universal and the human universal. The TCM universal’s status as the first universal is bound up with the fact that the history of technology has shown the description of the human being as a machine to be highly plausible, rather than a rhetorical exaggeration. Just as the algebra of capital is faithfully represented by a metaphorics of life, the corporeal appearance of the human being is faithfully expressed by a metaphorics of technology and the machine.

The human universal is realized via the transitional relationship between intimacy (PT) and technology (MTT). This gives rise to the important possibility of the ‘indifferentiation’ of the human being as subject. The normalized, emancipated subject finds her reflection in the technological object – an object that produces copies of models rather than individuals. Medicine, for example, is necessarily the everyday realization of indifference. Though the indifferent subject may suddenly become aware of her individuality and even her solitude through the recollection of a certain intimacy, she is still perfectly exemplified by the relevant tomographic data – especially when it predicts her death.

We are able to empirically inquire into the human being. Whether we are entitled to impose moral rules on such inquiry is one of the most controversial questions in philosophy. We nonetheless do impose such rules insofar as there is a universal conception of rights that, if not explicitly affirmed, is not ignored by any people on earth. Whether a universal morality can be justified is surely a question for idle philosophers. The human being is a universal that is asserted along with a morally presented notion of rights. The question of whether it is really possible to give a theoretical justification of universal rights is overshadowed by the necessity of their legitimation.

It might well be that the universalization of humanity (as the essence of the human) is a political response to the empirical identifiability of the human being. From this perspective, human rights would then have arisen as a result of a lack of rules governing empirical inquiry, rather than as a response to their formulation. The establishment of human rights would be necessary to compensate for the absence of a universal normative organization of inquiry into the other. Intersubjectivity could prove to be originarily an-archic. The TCM universal would then produce the postulate of the universality of human rights in a pragmatically necessary manner – making human rights a pragmatic integral of the TCM universal.

This by no means primary indication of the priority of the TCM universal also indicates how fundamentally the human being is determined by its relation to TCM. It should be emphasized that the human being is in no way the precondition of the TCM universal, but merely one of its possible integrals. This is one of the implications of the absolute possibility of TCM. This possibility transcends the human. Nevertheless, if the human being is not a precondition of the TCM universal, it necessarily belongs to it. The TCM universal is absolute possibility. Any intensive contingency – i.e. a contingency that is not merely arbitrary – turns into a necessity. In this sense, the human being is something like a determined possibility. From the outset, it is immanent to the absolute possibility of the TCM universal.

The TCM universal is therefore not a ‘correlationist’ figure. The ‘laws’ that play a guiding role in the TCM universal can be described, in Quentin Meillassoux’s terms, as ‘ancestral’.⁵² The ‘laws’ of technology.capital.medium would also exist without human beings. They nevertheless only precede the human being insofar as they produce the human being. It is not contingent that there are human beings. The human being is the necessary vehicle of the TCM universal, one of the forms of its integration. Herein lies the specificity of the relation between the first and the third universal.

3.4.3 The natural universal (Universal IV)

The fourth universal, nature, is made possible by the passage through the first three universals. At the same time, the first three universals are only possible through nature. The decisive criterion here is the status of the human being. If human beings are distinguished in the I-M-M by their specific properties, then the TCM universal necessarily remains the first universal. If, however, human beings are regarded simply as one thing among and alongside others, then the series of universals begin to revolve. On the one hand, the universality of nature is absolute; on the other, it is precarious. On the one hand, it is the source of all determinations; on the other, it is mediated by the second, scientific universal. The question, then, is whether it only exerts a subaltern influence on the normalized subject, or whether it is the inexhaustible source of the subject’s expropriation – and perhaps her ultimate expropriation.

In one of its primary senses, ‘nature’ signifies an occurrence. The Greek word phusis means growth; the Latin nasci, to be born. Both refer to a self-moving being, i.e. a living body. In nature, however, there are also inanimate things such as stones. These belong to nature insofar as they have ‘grown’ in the earth’s rock strata. What is essential here is that nature does not merely involve an element of ‘autonomy’; nature is this very autonomy.

In the initial manifestation of its growth, nature presents itself to us in the form of elements. What matters here is not whether there are held to be four such elements, as in the Presocratics (fire, air, water, earth), or five, as in Daoism (wood, fire, metal, water, earth) and Buddhism (earth, water, fire, air, space), but rather the significance and the experience of the elementary as such. This mode of experience serves to distinguish the original significance of the elementary from today’s periodic system, with its 118 elements. It is in this elementary manner that nature first comes to be experienced.

The elementary encounter with nature is rooted in the PT. It takes place in a local topography. The earth is divided up here into many ‘earths’. There is no question that the inhabitants of the Mediterranean region experience another nature than the inhabitants of Scandinavia. Each region is home to different gods. In the beginning, nature is a narrative, and the narratives that emerge from Iceland and Greece bear little resemblance to one another.

Nature is integrated in a number of ways into the inversion of the PT and the MTT in the I-M-M – the inversion that gives rise to the TCM universal. Modern science consists in the excavation of the MTT, which, once uncovered, begins to occupy itself with itself. Natural science amounts to an inquiry into the MTT by the MTT (through which the TCM universal reflects itself). In such scientific research, the PT no longer plays any role whatsoever.

This is bound up with the fact that nature has become the object of a normalized usage that continually borders on exploitation. The hyper-modern mass society has no choice but to take advantage of nature, not only to secure certain biopolitical necessities, but above all to produce the universal topography, to establish a global ‘transit space’.⁵³ This in turn serves the distribution of capital.

This initial, universal usage of nature is still oriented around the experience of the living body. From the earliest stages of the PT, the body has been the object of an elementary self-experience. The body consists of warmth, earth (flesh), liquid and air. This elementary experience of the body in its growth (its swelling and contraction) is so immediate that it is not only children, with their particular bodily sensitivity, who almost permanently undergo it. This ‘feeling of self’ continually emanates from the body – or rather, it is the body. Even within the solid edifices of the TCM universal, we remain exposed to the surrounding climatic conditions. Nature is geographically differentiated.

From this elementary perspective, then, nature has an initial, naïve presence that is attested to by the sensible experience of the body. In this body that is always my own and always other, nature suddenly acquires an immediate proximity. The body is always already related to the elements that not only surround it, but also sustain and give life to it. For us, nature is first of all the body – the lived body.

This is because the autonomy of nature is manifested in the body first of all. To be sure, this autonomy can also be observed in the process of meteorological change. Yet certain corporeal phenomena have a greater impact on us – and it is in any case particularly through their corporeal effects that meteorological changes manifest themselves. These phenomena primarily have an expropriating character.

Nature acquires a particular intensity in the form of Eros (which in the TCM universal becomes sexuality). Eros consists in an uncanny paroxysm in which two or more bodies violently enter into relation with one another. As such, it borders on rape, which in the moment of paroxysm itself can only be held at bay through a specifically human sensitivity. If Eros recalls a certain animality that is never fully present in the human being, then the human experience of Eros consists precisely in preventing this animality from surfacing fully. If Eros brings the autonomy of nature disturbingly to the fore, sexuality in the TCM universal consists precisely in curbing it.

Eros is thus marked by the aporia of maintaining limits in a state of abandon. The body that always holds itself back must be able to let itself be taken in order to give itself. In this ecstatic movement, its arbitrary growth becomes free self-development: sweat, mucus and semen are ‘autonomously’ repelled from the body. Even bleeding is an experience in which the body is liberated from the will.

The most explicit experience of this independence can perhaps be found in the Eros-driven process of procreation. This corporeal interpenetration leaves behind a trace that, more than anything else, represents growth in the immediacy of the body. The child appears as the tranquil continuation of an inexhaustible ecstasy that is experienced quite differently by the different sexes. Yet despite the potentially irreducible strangeness of the two sexes to one another, Eros remains the primary event that links us with the natural universal autonomously unfolding itself in its elements.

This corporeal nature is the precondition of the various uses of the body in the TCM universal. One of these uses is pornography, in all its forms. Like nature, the body is turned into an object of production. The body that processes pleasure is itself processed. The primary and secondary sexual characteristics are cosmetically and surgically modified. The skin is decorated with piercings and tattoos. Skin colour and body shape can also be varied. Bodily capacities can be pharmaceutically enhanced, artificially allowing them to be exhibited for longer. Pleasure has to be inexhaustible.

What is contained in pornography is the desired yet ultimately uncontrollable paroxysm of the erotic in the image of the other body. Pornography aims to make the pleasure of this event generally available. It is effective insofar as it involves a certain reduction. The charm of the other body is conveyed independently of any other intersubjective conditions (such as the transition from an everyday to an erotic situation), so that it necessarily takes on a virtual form. One can only ‘get straight to the point’ in domains that can be regulated by particular means of production (such as prostitution).

The virtual character of pornography, however, does not work against it or the pleasure it affords. It rather has to be emphasized. It must not appear too sterile, yet such staged pleasure has to be clearly distinguished from the pleasure enjoyed by the normalized subject. It is only in adverting to this difference that pornography gets through to its audience. Were processed pleasure merely a copy of normalized pleasure, pornography would not function. The attraction of this form of pornography thus lies in its fantasy-fulfilment.

Pornography is then a striking example of the precarious significance of nature: even as a mere trigger in an immense virtual field, it does not simply break with the elementary experience of the autonomy of nature, but rather takes advantage of it. We can then say that the TCM universal’s relation to nature, to the earth, is pornographic. We compel nature to reveal itself completely. Yet in doing so we transform it into a virtual sphere that no longer bears any resemblance to the localized wilderness of the PT. The earth is then less a porn star exercising her economic mastery over the augmentation of her body than a prostitute fighting for her life. However that may be: nature is feminine, and its technological processing may lead us to wonder whether there is not an essential connection between technology and pornography – whether technology as such is not pornographic.

The TCM universal makes use of the desire that ties the subject to nature. Pornography in particular is utilized by technology, capital and the medium to validate the subject’s affirmative bearing. It also allows the eccentric dimensions of Eros to be brought into line. The same is true where violence is concerned: in order to prevent outbreaks of violence against institutions, the universal establishes areas outside of its monopoly on violence where violence can be appropriately channelled. (One would then be mistaken in thinking that shoot-em-up games fuel a desire for violence – quite the contrary.)

The ambiguity of nature in the TCM universal has been historically reflected in philosophical conceptions of matter. In the Timaeus, Plato on the one hand assigns the most beautiful geometrical bodies, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron and the cube, to the elements of fire, air, water and earth, respectively.⁵⁴ This constitutes the first mathematization of matter. From a Pythagorean, i.e. arithmetical perspective, this means that matter can be explained in terms of numerical ratios. As is well known, however, when Plato comes to discuss matter in the context of the strange space that is the chora, he draws on erotic images. For readers such as Luce Irigaray, such images cannot but recall the uterus [Gebär-Mutter].⁵⁵

What is less well known is that Aristotle, in the first book of his Physics, states that something that persists must underlie all natural phenomena, i.e. all that moves or changes. That which underlies such phenomena is the hypokeimenon. Together with form or shape (morphē), Aristotle states that it is a joint cause of what comes to be, in the manner of a mother (hōsper mētēr).⁵⁶ To be sure, Aristotle is not speaking directly of matter here, yet it is matter that underlies form. What (jointly) underlies all living beings, then, is the mater, the mother. The latent proximity of nature and Eros is never far from the surface. Here the autonomy of nature is discovered to be mathematically measurable and at the same time experienced as mythically expropriating. The PT and the MTT are interwoven.

Matter – even divided up into sub-atomic units – cannot then be completely cut off from its relation to the originary body. This nonetheless also means that, in the modern era, the Platonic quarrel between mathematics and myth has been resolved. The TCM universal has driven the mythical qualities from things and has succeeded in mathematizing the world. The indifferent, emancipated, normalized subject is oriented by technology.capital.medium, since the TCM universal now constitutes the world as such. (The TCM universal has relegated myth to its own domain of [artistic] production.)

The TCM universal is determined in such a way as to integrate nature into itself. It can never do so completely. Nature breaks through again and again in the differentiated subject’s experience of intimacy – not only in the erotic encounter, but also in the experience of injury, sickness and aging – i.e. in the experience of loss. Growth is violently interrupted or diverted, or begins to recede. The body is subject to a process of dissolution and deterioration, which it attempts to counter using various technological means. It becomes clear, however, that it is increasingly sliding from the TCM universal into the natural universal, where it will ultimately vanish. What remains is only bodily decay or ash.

The experience of the autonomous character of nature is the most immediate experience of being determined. Nowhere is the human being so directly confronted with necessity than in her own and the other’s body. This would seem to be contradicted by the fact that the she seeks to reject this determinism in various ways. It is precisely in this contradiction that she comes to know the freedom of the will. Nevertheless, there is nowhere beyond the sphere of causality, beyond nature, from which such a freedom could ‘begin’. And if there is such a place, then it is impossible. Nothing can be said of it, other than that nothing is determined there, since there is nothing there at all.

What remains to be asked is whether the autonomy of nature can be thought entirely without the TCM universal – or indeed, without any of the other universals. Its autonomy seems to imply that nature does not require anything other than itself. It unfolds as it wants to, not as we want it to. Long before there were the first three universals, there was nature. This line of thought seems to suggest that there could be a world – a nature – without the TCM universal. The TCM universal would then amount to a contingent form of nature. Even the MTT as a particular configuration of the I-M-M would be one of nature’s contingent forms.

It would nonetheless be a mistake to think that another nature is possible. Such thought experiments might at best apply to particular natural phenomena. It is possible that other highly intelligent lifeforms exist, with different bodies. If so, it is still inevitable that they would manifest themselves in the form of determinations of the TCM universal. In its spatio-temporal extension, nature necessarily leads to the TCM universal. This necessity is inscribed in the intelligence of the MTT, which finds its expression in human beings. This does not mean, however, that the determinations of the TCM universal are consummated in the human being. We cannot say why the natural universal and thus human beings are contained in the TCM universal; we can only acknowledge this to be a con-sequence of the MTT.

Not only is the TCM universal unable to completely integrate nature into itself; nature also constitutes the ultimate expropriation of the TCM universal – a final revolution whose determinations are already discernible and disclosed to us by the sciences. If the TCM universal should collapse, it will only be in an apocalyptic situation in which the usage of nature will form the locus of a struggle for power.

3.4.4 The first universal hierarchy

There are at least four universals. Universal I integrates and extegrates Universal II; Universal II integrates and extegrates Universal III; Universal III integrates and extegrates Universal IV. Universal I thus integrates and extegrates all of the subsequent universals. This series forms a hierarchy that unfolds the homotopic universal topography of the MTT.

The universal is not itself a member of this series, although it is the cause of its presence. As its cause, it presents itself in the very presence of the universals. The universal, however, is neither Α nor Ω.

The four universals are not distinct from one another. They not only overlap in certain respects; they are also concretely and historically interconnected in ways that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. This interconnectedness means that each universal is present in every other. What distinguishes the first universal is not simply that it manifests itself in all of the others, but that it makes all of the others possible.

The four universals are universalizations of one universality. The universal is a form that presents itself in four ways: in technology.capital.medium as TCM, in science, in the human being and in nature. This fourfold presentation of the universal form is not a systematic totality, for alongside the identity established through the reciprocal integration of the four universals, there is also a heterogeneity that extegrates the four universals from one another. The consequence of this heterogeneity is that while we can more or less know what takes place in each of the four universals, we can never know the one meaning of these events. This is also important for the question of religion, which plays no role whatsoever in the most powerful universal, nor, therefore, in the three subsequent universals. It would in any case be necessary to ask whether the inversion of the PT and the MTT does not turn religion into an anachronism.

The third, human universal is integrated into and extegrated from the two superordinate universals. This is because everything that has proved to be universal in human beings and in the ‘idea’ of the human has developed as a response to the first two universals. Concept formation has always had to take place through the rejection of an initially more powerful and real order of things. The declaration of human rights in the wake of the American and French revolutions was a response to their prior feudalistic suppression. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 adverts to the massive human rights violations perpetrated during the Second World War. Wars and revolutions of this order always stem from the first two universals, which mobilize the third universal. The latter is characterized by its dependence on prior events deriving from the first and second universals.⁵⁷

This also accounts for the dependence of ‘applied ethics’ on the first and second universals. All of the questions it addresses derive from these two universals. Human beings are preoccupied by questions of eugenics and euthanasia, for example, because the first and second universals continually lower the threshold of ethical acceptability in a utilitarian fashion. When technologically can grant us everything we desire, resisting this temptation becomes almost impossible. And even if we do manage, here and there, to reject certain possibilities within the domain of absolute possibility, our ethical relation to the TCM universal remains essentially defensive and reactive.

The same holds for ethical standards on the internet. Only when it becomes technologically possible to spy on people’s private lives by monitoring their online activities does privacy protection become a burning issue. This debate presupposes the TCM universal, which determines the ethical and political positions that spring up around it. Insofar as these influence the way in which human beings understand themselves, the TCM universal also plays a determining role in anthropology.

This means that the third universal necessarily presupposes the other two universals. It is integrated into the first universal, since human universality would be impossible without technology.capital.medium. It is integrated into the second, since the scientific and thus medical understanding of the human contributes to its universality. Yet it is also extegrated from the first and second, since the human being lays claim to a specific quality that can only exist independently of the other two universals. This quality can crudely be designated as freedom. Yet it is never so far-reaching as to be able to elevate itself above the two prior universals to become the first universal. On the contrary: there is a freedom of total affirmation and integration; philosophical freedom is something else altogether.

That the TCM universal posits all of the other universals is an anthropomorphic con-sequence. In a world without human beings, the TCM universal would be unable to reflect itself. The TCM universal thus indicates the importance of the human universal, without the latter being able to accede to first place in the universal hierarchy. This anthropomorphic con-sequence does not consist in a ‘sense’ that would transcend its concrete determinations. Though the TCM universal reflects itself in intelligence, it does not ‘need’ human beings. It produces them without needing them.

This first universal hierarchy can also be interpreted in terms of the relation between power and actuality. Here it is important to recall that the supremacy of the TCM universal cannot be understood as contingent. The idea of a world driven by a selfless poiesis, i.e. by an anti-economic, wasteful outpouring, is a phantasm. The production of such phantasms is intrinsic to the TCM universal. Only impossibility is capable of escaping this production. Impossibility is the site of philosophy.

3.4.5 The second universal hierarchy: Quantity → quality

Quantity is the first and most important category of the TCM universal. Its categorial constitution, its quality, consists in the interplay of quantities. This follows from the supremacy of the MTT, which determines itself as the omnipresence of production. The MTT of the TCM universal – its intrinsic linear-vectorial generation of magnitudes – constitutes a reality that more than anything else creatively constructs and destructively transforms the world (to borrow Schumpeter’s terms). This is production. It always generates measurable quantities. Both individual technological objects and the total number of such objects are measured. Linguistically, quantity is expressed through the difference between the positive, comparative and superlative degrees.

Quantity is that which adds and multiplies (i.e. increases) or subtracts and divides (i.e. decreases) the one. This opens up a series consisting of countable units. In the natural world, such a series is comprised of individuals. No two snowflakes are ever quite the same, for example (and for the same reason, monozygotic twins are extremely rare). In the technological sphere, the series consists of copies that are all the same, even if they vary in certain respects (such as colour or other details). In the TCM universal, then, quantity first of all refers to a quantum of models and copies. It is from models and copies that series are formed.

We can then already exclude one form of quantity from the TCM universal, namely plurality.⁵⁸ Multiplicity in no way implies plurality. On the contrary: since plurality is only necessary if the mathematico-technological character of the universal requires it, and since the MTT contains no plurality indicator, there can be no such necessity. Indeed, precisely the opposite has to be assumed: the TCM universal in no way requires a plurality of its forms. Through its capital it rather unfolds a strongly uniform kind of multiplicity in the form of the possibility of an ever greater number, a plus ultra. Plurality is a precarious phenomenon; it is not a necessary feature of production. The power of the number, or more exactly the nominal number, seems to outstrip the particularity of the plural.

‘The power of the number’ is an unmathematical formulation. The number as such, as an arithmetical phenomenon, has no power. Yet neither is it powerless. It is a symbol belonging to another order of being. From out of this mathematical order, it determines the organization of the world. Without the number, there would be nothing. Above all, there would be no TCM universal, which uses numbers to record its movement. Used in counting and measuring, the number is an indicator of production. It is therefore not a, but rather the symbol of the TCM universal.

In production, the number is an indicator of performance. Performance is measurable. The power of the number is then manifested in the energy expended in the completion of a task. The result of this expenditure cannot consist in a One, in something unique – in an individual. This is because performance must always be comparable, i.e. must always be traceable back to a common root. The tallest building in the world is, like all beings, one, and as the tallest building it is also singular, yet it is only the tallest building in the world because there are many other comparably tall buildings. Though it has not been mass produced, it is not an individual, but rather a singular specimen [Unikat]. The creation of an individual can never be conceived in terms of performance (nor – in this sense at least – can art).

In the TCM universal, quantity counts as performance: the higher the quantity, the better. This applies to capital growth in particular, which cannot be thought in abstraction from increasing technological perfection and the presence of the medium. In the TCM universal, growth, perfection and presence are first of all three measurable quantities: the more, the better; the more perfect, the better; the more present, the better. The TCM universal organizes and regulates itself by continually representing itself to itself in numerical form.

This serves to systematically determine a universal form of behaviour. The basic arithmetical operations not only orient this behaviour; they also provide an outline of its essential elements. Quantity is of the highest universal-ontological significance. It is not a guiding principle of our praxis, but the principle of all guiding principles, since it is a principle of the TCM universal.

To add is to affirm. To affirm is to supplement oneself with something, to appropriate, to be in credit. That means taking, taking on, using, profiting. Addition is successive growth, an increase in size or figure in general. It is youth, life. It is also progress, the emergence of the new, the intensification that produces qualitative change.

To subtract is to negate. To negate is to give something up or away, to lose, to be in debit. That means giving, giving away, experiencing loss. Subtraction is continual contraction, a decrease in size or figure. It is aging, death. It is thus decay – the vanishing of what has been outlived.

Multiplication falls under addition. What addition achieves through a gradual process, multiplication achieves in one bound. This leap is nevertheless always orderly, clear, controlled.

Division falls under subtraction, since one usually divides the larger by the smaller. In division, however, the loss that is evident in subtraction vanishes, since division also amounts to sharing, sharing out, solidarity – even justice.

This already gives us a glimpse of one of quantity’s distinctive determinations. Where questions of justice, and particularly social justice, are concerned, quantity has a tendency to turn into quality. Quantity does not exhibit this tendency in its abstract form. Large numbers are not qualitatively different from small numbers. This changes, however, when numbers indicate scaled values. When numbers designate product volumes and their degree of perfection, qualities emerge.⁵⁹

The medium of this movement, this transformation of quantity into quality, is money. It is the core value of the TCM universal. Without it, the motivational economy of the universal would be inconceivable. The addition or multiplication of a quantity of money [Geldzahl] produces a particular quality that has a unique status in the TCM universal. This quality is the difference between poverty and wealth, which is a difference between degrees of freedom. The value of money is always expressed in the form of a number. Yet since it is the source of the only relevant distinction within the TCM universal, it always appears under the nimbus of its metaphysical significance.

Sexual, cultural, religious, national, generational, educational and human-animal differences are all secondary to the difference between poverty and wealth. This is because these other differences could not emerge without the difference between poverty and wealth. In extremely poor regions, there is no possibility of the emancipation of the oppressed, no recognition of cultural difference, no tranquil acceptance of other religions. The diverse, open, liberal society is the wealthy society. Money is – the prime matter of freedom.

There is an unhappy dialectic at work here, since in enabling such differentiation, the TCM universal also annuls it. The complete recognition of difference leads to indifference, for it is in the moment of recognition that the elusive otherness constitutive of difference loses its significance. It is no wonder, then, that the only difference in the TCM universal is the difference between wealth and poverty. For it is no difference in the full sense of the word: money divides by uniting.

In the TCM universal, all subjects are concerned with prosperity. This is the precondition of life in the TCM universal, even if the concrete goal of praxis is not always wealth. The drive to prosper forms the basis of a general consensus – which, incidentally, contributes to the (provisional) impossibility of revolution. Since all subjects, including the very poorest, respect the difference between rich and poor, the violence they might otherwise unleash is maintained within certain limits. The TCM universal ensures that this difference is respected above all.

The quantitative measure of money is its value. This value is expressed as a power of disposal. Disposing of a small quantity of money is poverty; disposing of a large quantity is wealth. Wealth in turn allows one to dispose of objective goods such as education, mobility, luxury items, and so on. Poverty prevents one from doing so. Poverty is powerlessness. In the TCM universal, the power of disposal is identical to freedom. This is the primary meaning of freedom in the TCM universal.⁶⁰

The power of disposal is also a pleasure purchasing power. The primary form of pleasure in the TCM universal is the pleasure of consumption. The more refined and exquisite the consumption, the more intense the pleasure. The quality of the pleasure experienced (itself tied to the quantum of money involved) is thus relative to the buyer’s possession of the means required to procure it. The notion of a ‘simple pleasure’ is only meaningful from the perspective of a more refined pleasure. Living in a ‘simple hut’ is no pleasure for someone whose limited power of disposal makes the ‘simple life’ a necessity rather than a possibility. For someone who is poor, such a way of living affords no pleasure at all.

In the TCM universal, freedom is tied to the value of money. Freedom here is the freedom of disposal, the freedom to turn one’s assets, property, and their equivalent value into a number in such a way that the movement of desire and pleasure (in both its velocity and extent) overflows all boundaries. The difference between having a plane or train ticket and having a private plane is, in the context of the TCM universal, a qualitative rather than a quantitative difference.⁶¹

The difference between wealth and poverty is the defining difference of the TCM universal. This means that in the universal there is and can be no motivation to level out this difference. To do so would be to paralyse freedom’s principal source of motivation in the power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power. For it is intrinsic to freedom, and particularly to the pleasure of disposing of things, that not everyone can dispose equally of everything. It is only in this way that we can explain the desire for luxury and capital.

The TCM universal is an event of freedom. Never before in the history of humanity has this global movement reached such an intensity. Never has the subjective power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power been as great as it is today. Here too, quantity is an organizing category. The universal can add this to its list of achievements; it is nothing if not effective.

Discussions of ‘instrumental reason’ are insufficient here, since they fail to take into account the pleasure afforded by the instrument. It is not only a question of using technological devices for certain ends, but also of the pleasure that such usage brings. And the more exquisite the product, the greater the pleasure. The universal subject has long enjoyed an affective relation to the TCM universal. Poverty and wealth – these quantities that transform into qualities – are bound up with various dimensions of feeling and pleasure.

Weber’s expression, the ‘disenchantment of the world’, refers to the universal establishment of an instrumental rationality that drives all magic and wonder from the world. Weber rightly recognized that a thoroughgoing normalization process had taken place, in which anything non-pragmatic was not only portrayed as a threat, but also as senseless. The various figures of desire have now become more manageable. They have come to be concentrated around the relation between quantity and quality. Yet here they have started to work a new kind of magic that Weber did not foresee.

As a result of the complete normalization of desire, wealth has acquired an almost mystical quality. For the normalized subject, wealth is bliss. It frees one from all misery and care, and it frees one for all of the possibilities that the TCM universal offers its rich subjects, i.e. those free subjects who have the greatest number of possibilities at their disposal. It validates the subject’s desire by allowing this desire to synchronize with the internal dynamics of the universal. The infinitely affirmative subject merges with the absolute possibility of her being, thereby experiencing the most elementary pleasure. The fulfilment of the normalized subject’s desire: the progressive intensification of her participation in the first universal until her very self disappears into its technological, capitalistic and media-based energies.

Money is an indifferent medium of disposal. The more one has, the greater one’s power of disposal. Wealth forms the threshold at which the transition from quantity to quality takes place. At this point, the indifference of the normalized subject is transformed into a sense of identity with the TCM universal. A mystical union takes place. The normalized subject comes to experience a mathematico-technological freedom in the absolutely manifest presence of TCM. The subject infinitely affirms the universal, and is rewarded by being infinitely affirmed by the universal in turn. The divine elements of the TCM unity are bestowed upon the subject. For a moment she circulates within the pure movement of the universal energies. Then she immediately experiences her affirmation, and with renewed energy returns to the production of these very energies.

For all its productivity, however, it nonetheless remains doubtful whether the TCM universal makes possible the ‘overabundance’⁶² in which it participates. This ‘overabundance’ is the ‘in-exhaustibly unexhausted’ – i.e. that which withdraws from the MTT and its economy. And in truth the absolute possibility of the universal is only one possibility – one that is tied to the TCM unity. Other possibilities, such as the possibility of the PT, are obscured in principle by the subject’s disinhibited motivation. For the TCM universal, this infinite ‘overabundance’ is an impossibility.

The ‘overabundance’ is the unprethinkable and impossible Es gibt,⁶³ which immeasurably exceeds production and which knows no production since it produces nothing. This impossible Es gibt springs from an intimacy that has nothing to do with the TCM universal’s rich/poor distinction. In intimacy, there is an other freedom.

3.4.5.1 Excursus: Quantity and time

Science fiction presents us with the future as the Hollywood machine fantasizes it to be. Though the genre has produced highly incisive works (such as the novels of Stanislaw Lem), it is essentially premised on the idea that technological progress will maintain its current pace, ultimately making such presently inconceivable possibilities as time travel and extra-terrestrial encounters a reality.

This is unlikely. The pace of technological development will have drastically slowed by the year 11014, if there is still any development at all. In the meantime, the speed of travel will continue to increase, yet it will reach a limit that is no longer very far away. Likewise, communications technologies will not continue to develop indefinitely. Materials and therefore products will be further streamlined, and nanotechnologies will come to be used in new products. Yet technology cannot become immaterial; it is essentially tied to the product, i.e. to matter. Furthermore, the universal subject’s attention span is limited. Future generations may increasingly come to grow up with the medium, yet fatigue is as integral to the mind as regeneration. As long as human beings remain human, the finitude of the lived body will remain insurmountable.

Certain markets that are periodically reinvigorated by technological innovation will disappear. The technological leap from the tube televisions of the forties and fifties to today’s flatscreen plasma televisions will not be repeated in the next sixty years. This will lead to a certain stagnation. Other markets will of course open up, yet the economic opportunities oriented around the human body are not unlimited. However many hands or eyes the subject may one day possess, there will come a point when it will seem absurd to add new organs or to further perfect existing ones.

In this advanced state of affairs, repetition and the sheer mass of repeated events will become a considerable problem. Art, for example, lives on the pathos of the original, the new, the unseen and the unheard-of. The leap from Phidias to Piet Mondrian or (in a different manner) to Jeff Koons is enormous. Yet it took place over 2,500 years. In the next 2,500 years, we cannot expect to see similar progress. For what is art to progress toward? It will rather be a question of retreading a path that has already been taken. Aside from the question of whether we will be interested in the various possible ways of combining elements of the past, we will also be confronted with the simple problem of storage space. At a certain point, artistic artifacts will be consigned to databases without our knowing who will concern themselves with them. The same holds for novels, symphonies and their myriad interpretations.

One of the universal subject’s central sources of motivation, particularly in the ersatz religion of sport, is the record. It too will appear in a new light. In sports such as running and swimming, where success is measured in terms of speed, each new record will be separated from the last by an ever smaller number. Where in previous decades the difference between records was measured in tenths of a second, it will come to be measured in hundredths, and then thousandths of a second. At a certain point, it will come to seem meaningless. The same holds for the repetition of sporting victories. Winning the football world cup five times in fifty years is remarkable; doing so ten times in a century is impressive; yet doing so a hundred times in a millennium will be boring. And crowning a thousandth victory with a trophy will seem absurd.

The historical sciences will also be affected by the problem of repetition and the task of documenting it in detail. Should there be five, ten, twenty more world wars, it is not only the enlightened subject’s self-conception that will be shaken. Even the expression, the ‘Eighteenth World War’ rings strangely. When technological progress – the measure of progress as such – slows down and eventually stagnates, history will lose its key criterion. History will implode on account of its sheer length and the number of events it contains.

Events may of course come to pass whose significance we cannot yet foresee. The con-sequences of a nuclear war, for example, would be unlike those of previous wars. A large meteor strike would present humanity with new challenges. But the probability of either event occurring is low. It is doubtful that a future world war would be a nuclear war. Nevertheless, the contours of the climate catastrophe can already be discerned. The apocalyptic reduction, the revelation of a last event, would have revolutionary con-sequences. It will take place.

The temporal dimension of quantity – the quantity of decades and centuries – is one of the double-topological conditions of the universal subject. It will transform the universal topography and the subject’s patho-topo-logical integration into it in unprecedented ways. TCM freedom will lose its mystique. Freedom will have been a memory.

Notes

¹ Cf. the passages on Schumpeter in section 3.2.

² Cf. Nicholas of Cusa, Trialogus de Possest, in A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, ed. and trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 76–7. God is the possest, actualized possibility [rendered in the German translation of Cusa as ‘Können-ist’ (Philosophisch-Theologische Werke, Bd. 3, Hamburg: Meiner, 2002) – TR]: ‘Posse esse est tantum quantum posse est actu’ (‘the possibility-to-be exists insofar as the possibility-to-be is actual’ [‘Könnensein (ist) so viel wie ‘Können wirklich sein’]). Here the possibility emerges of a theology of the TCM universal.

³ In accordance with the Greek etymology of the term, technology is considered here as a particular kind of capacity – a meaning that the German Technik retains better than its English cognate – TR.

⁴ Cf. with regard to what follows: Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1140a7ff.; Aristotle, Physics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Book II.

⁵ Plato, Timaeus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 53e.

⁶ Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 694 (B 867). Kant’s teleologia rationis humanae implies practical ends, and therefore the practical end of the ‘highest good’. This means that Kant integrates the highest moral ends and the most advantageous technological ends into a unified teleology, even if he divides these ends between ‘two worlds’. Yet what is the relation between moral and technological questions? Kant of course conceived this in terms of the difference between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. Yet here too we encounter the characteristic unity of technology and ethics, along with a genuine abyss of which Kant was of course well aware: where technological ends are concerned, there is no freedom – morality, by contrast, presupposes it. Indeed, a certain destiny of metaphysics can be formulated as follows: in the observations of physics there is no freedom to be found. Freedom must then be explained in an anti-physicalist manner, either through the affirmation of a-causal phenomena or of a non-physical form of causality. Yet is ‘causality through freedom’, as Kant puts it, even conceivable? It is here that the credibility of philosophy is at stake. With his first ‘Critique’, Kant sought to restore this credibility – did he succeed?

⁷ Gramophone → vinyl record → CD → download. In between there appeared the now-obsolete technologies of reel-to-reel and cassette tapes.

⁸ Cf. e.g. Johannes Fried, Das Mittelalter: Geschichte und Kultur (Munich: dtv, 2011). This exceptional book tells a story of progress which, interestingly, can be presented via the significance of Aristotle’s work in the Middle Ages. Every time a new set of Aristotle translations appears, progress ensues …

⁹ ‘Es “findet” wirklich etwas, was vorher schon da war.’ The German verb for ‘invent’ is ‘erfinden’, which in literal terms implies a form of active finding – TR.

¹⁰ Heidegger speaks here of an ‘incubation period’. Cf. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 4.

¹¹ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26.

¹² Kurt Bayertz, Myriam Gerhard and Walter Jaeschke, eds, Der Materialismus-Streit (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012).

¹³ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981), 189. The Tractatus famously concludes: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ Cf. here Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Verso Books, 2011).

¹⁴ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 486.

¹⁵ Ibid., 487.

¹⁶ Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 10 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 2015); Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 731–6.

¹⁷ Ernst Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

¹⁸ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 54. The sentence in full reads: ‘World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom [Forschritt im Bewußtsein der Freiheit] – a progress whose necessity it is our business to comprehend.’ The dialectical necessity of history is the same as the technological necessity of history. It would be quite mistaken to conceive the MTT merely as a history of things. In the extension of space-time, the human being is a ‘thing’ equipped with enormous intelligence. Yet it is precisely this intelligence which links and ties it to the MTT.

¹⁹ That technology and capital form a unified whole is, incidentally, a rather commonplace observation. As early as 1902, Werner Sombart wrote: ‘Under technology in the broadest sense we understand all procedures for achieving a particular goal; under material or economic technology we understand all procedures for producing goods’ (Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus: Bd. 1: Die Genesis des Kapitalismus [Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1902]). It would also suffice, however, to quote from any of Marx’s texts (such as the Communist Manifesto). It is a weakness of Heidegger’s interpretation of technology that it largely relegates the technology.capital unity to the margins. On the other hand, however, it is remarkable how clearly he sees the connection between technology and the medium. Nevertheless, he never managed to adopt a sober attitude toward it – it always remained something to overcome.

²⁰ The inventions that have produced and determined the universal topography include:

The machine

1712: steam engine; immediately used to power steam trains and ships

1886: internal combustion engine; invention of the automobile

1903: integration of the engine into the airplane; first flight

1941: first serially produced helicopter (the German Focke-Achgelis Fa 223)

1942: jet engine: Messerschmitt Me 262, a quantum leap for civil (and of course military) aviation

Production technologies

1870: conveyor belt, Cincinnati slaughterhouse

1913: assembly line automobile manufacture and the Model T Ford

The rocket

1926: first liquid-fuelled rocket, USA

1942: first long-range, guided ballistic missile, Peenemünde, Germany

1957: Sputnik

1958: SCORE, NASA’s first communications satellite

1960: plans are drawn up for the Apollo Program in the USA; 1969 first moon landing

Communications technologies

1833: telegram transmission via telegraph lines

1837: Morse telegraph

1844: first official telegraph lines in the USA

1861: telephone, Germany; Frankfurt’s Physikalische Verein fails to see the potential of the invention, thus:

1876: first telephone produced in the USA on the basis of the phonograph

1882: first long-distance transmission of electricity (over 57 km), in the environs of Munich

Late 1870s: first telephone networks

1878: the electrodynamic loudspeaker

1888: radio waves

1904: radar (Radio Aircraft Detection and Ranging); only demonstrates its true potential in the Second World War

1918: revolutionary workers in Berlin take over the airwaves, erroneously declaring the victory of the revolution (the ‘Funkerspuk’)

1919/20: first radio stations after the First World War (the Netherlands, Germany and the USA)

1925: launch of the ‘Blatthaller’, the first commercial electrodynamic loudspeaker, at the Berlin Funkausstellung

1926: first wireless telecommunication in Deutsche Reichsbahn and Deutsche Reichspost trains

1938: portable telephone

Late 1980s: roll-out of digital mobile networks

Between 1990 and 2000: World Wide Web

2001: iPod; 2007: iPhone; 2010: iPad

Electronic image technologies

1839: still camera (cf. the daguerreotypes of Schelling and Schopenhauer)

1878–98: development of roll film

1888: moving image camera

1895: 15-minute film shown in Berlin; invention of the cinematograph in Paris

1910 on: founding of a film production facility in a small Californian neighbourhood: in 1915, Hollywood gets to work with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (the most successful silent film of all time)

1929: the Witzleben broadcasting company transmits the first televisual images (with sound from 1934 on)

1936: first live televisual broadcast (the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games)

Television is initially no match for radio, but triumphs in the 1950s

Computing

1941: Z 3, the first programmable, binary computer

Early 1970s: development of powerful microprocessors

1976: the ‘Homebrew Computer Club’ develops the first personal computer

²¹ Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 110.

²² Ibid., 279.

²³ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in Collected Works, vol. 35 (New York: International Publishers, 1996), 166.

²⁴ Ibid., 314.

²⁵ Ibid., 315, my emphasis.

²⁶ This can be explained via a passage from the beginning of Capital. At an important juncture Marx returns to the ‘great thinker who was the first to analyse so many forms, whether of thought, society, or Nature’ (69), namely, Aristotle. He saw that ‘5 beds = 1 house […] is not to be distinguished from 5 beds = so much money’. He also saw that ‘the value relation which gives rise to this expression makes it necessary that the house should qualitatively be made the equal of the bed’, since ‘without such an equalisation, these two clearly different things could not be compared with each other as commensurable quantities’. At this point, however, Aristotle breaks off his analysis of the ‘form of value’. The ‘commensurability’ (70), or, in the Greek, the symmetry of these things, ‘can only be something foreign to their real nature’. Marx notes that the Greek thinker, ‘therefore, himself tells us what barred the way to his further analysis’, namely, ‘the absence of any concept of value’. What, Marx then asks, is ‘that equal something, that common substance, which admits of the value of the beds being expressed by a house’? For Aristotle, ‘such a thing, in truth, cannot exist’. Yet exist it does: what is equal in the beds and the house, insofar as they are of equal value as commodities, is the ‘human labour’ that has gone into them. Marx then concludes: ‘There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently of labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers’ (ibid.). Over the course of the Middle Ages and the modern era, the inequality of human beings was successively broken down, particularly in the context of revolutions (even though the American revolution did not immediately bring an end to slavery). We therefore assume that the form of value of things is a function of labour understood on the basis of the equality of human beings. This concept of labour presupposes a worker who is recognized as a human being. Since for Aristotle, by contrast, labour is slave labour, it cannot be assessed on the basis of a universal criterion. In the absence of such, we would have to ask what criterion could have been used to assess it, since a criterion is always (in one way or another) universal. We now tend to assume that slave-based societies are a thing of the past. The economy of labour is therefore interpreted on the basis of the equality of human beings. As Marx writes, the ‘secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice’ (ibid.). In the context of today’s TCM universal, however, a decipherable ground of the ‘equivalence of all labor’ has withdrawn from us. It has drifted into the realm of the imaginary and even the fantastical. Yet if, as Marx suggests, the ‘equivalence of all labor’ as human labour presupposes ‘human equality’, then the contemporary non-equivalence of all labour can only mean that the equality of all human beings has lost the ‘fixity of a popular prejudice’. It is now merely a prejudice. We are therefore living in the age of a new kind of slavery. What this thesis also contends is that it is no longer possible to speak of a unified form of value. The TCM universal produces the inequality of human beings in the imaginary and fantastical realms of a shattered form of value. There is no longer any criterion of labour. The wealth of certain societies can now only be explained on the basis of the destruction of a humane conception of labour.

²⁷ Benjamin Franklin, ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’, in Works of the Late Doctor Benjamin Franklin (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793), 55–9. Franklin’s famous essay begins: ‘Remember that time is money.’ Where Franklin writes that ‘money is of a prolific generating nature’, it would be more accurate simply to say that ‘money is nature’.

²⁸ Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2010), 73.

²⁹ Joseph A. Schumpeter, ‘Über die mathematische Methode der theoretischen Ökonomie’, in Aufsätze zur ökonomischen Theorie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1952), 535.

³⁰ Cf. the relation between the (John) Taylor Rule for the calculation of the nominal interest rate, formulated in 1993, and the so-called financial crisis.

³¹ Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 73.

³² Friedrich. A. Hayek, The Pure Theory of Capital, ed. Lawrence H. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 89.

³³ Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 108.

³⁴ The example is suggestive, yet problematic, since it is ultimately impossible to imagine anyone, ‘primitive’ or not, attempting to use magic to repair a broken stick. The problem of the relation between magic and reason begins at the level of the invisible, of the withdrawn (e.g. with illness, the weather, or destiny). The pragmatic solution could thus only have come to dominate once the PT had receded behind the MTT. In my view, this point is brought to the fore in David Hume’s discussion of miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Stephen Buckle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 96–116. The conclusion of Hume’s discussion indicates the extent to which he finds himself in the midst of the inversion of the PT and MTT. He is not yet able to write what he thinks. The revolution has not yet become public.

³⁵ Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 109.

³⁶ Ibid., 110.

³⁷ Ibid., 111.

³⁸ Ibid., 252.

³⁹ Hegel is the metaphysician of capital. This is not just because Marx’s studies of the Science of Logic may have exerted an influence on his Capital (cf. here the work of Christopher J. Arthur). The dialectical movement of spirit itself represents a form of growth in which loss is only a means to new growth. To be sure, ‘absolute spirit’ is not a figure of pure accumulation. Yet the internal structure of this shape of spirit moves within an economy that traverses the vectorial passage from poverty to wealth. It is in his antipathy toward the ethics of poverty cultivated by the Franciscans, however, that Hegel proves most clearly to be the metaphysician of capital. In his ‘Address on the Tercentenary of the Submission of the Augsburg Confession’ of 1830, he speaks of the ‘sacred virtue’ of ‘poverty’ in the ‘[Roman] Church’: ‘It [the Church] consequently has a low opinion of industriousness and probity in the care and administration of property, and of diligence in the acquisition of [material] goods, which are not only necessary to preserve life but also serve to help others; it thereby rates idleness above work, stupidity over ingenuity, and carelessness above foresight and probity’ (in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Political Writings, ed. Lawrence Dickey, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 193). Hegel the Protestant is simply unable to see the monks’ ‘form of life’ as a worthwhile alternative. Cf. here Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Hegel’s thought already moves within the parameters of the TCM universal, which has no place for the monasteries.

⁴⁰ Aristotle, On the Soul, in Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 418aff.

⁴¹ Ibid., 419a16–20.

⁴² Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 369.

⁴³ Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

⁴⁴ Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993).

⁴⁵ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 9.

⁴⁶ Cf. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Spinoza: The Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), Part 1, Proposition 9: ‘The more reality or being a thing has, the more attributes it has.’ Spinoza’s definition of reality is to be found in Part 2, Definition 6: ‘By reality and perfection I mean the same thing.’ In a remark on Proposition 13 in Part 2, Spinoza notes that ‘we cannot deny that ideas differ among themselves as do their objects, and that one is more excellent than another and contains more reality than another, just as the object of one idea is more excellent and contains more reality’. There are therefore ‘ideas’ and ‘objects’ that contain more or less reality according to their degree of perfection. A healthy body, for example, is more real than a sick body. This accords with much of our everyday experience. Is a wilted flower, for example, still a flower? In according intimacy an ontological status between the real and the unreal, however, I have something else in mind. Reality involves appearance. Intimacy appears only as withdrawal. The TCM enjoys the highest reality (the Kantian omnitudo realitatis). All that is real is measured in relation to it. What is furthest from its determining power has the least reality. And in comparison with the highest reality, the least reality is (for the TCM universal) already the unreal.

⁴⁷ Aristotle, Metaphysics, in Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 980a21. The paragraph that follows references Aristotle’s Metaphysics throughout.

⁴⁸ The extension of the term ‘Wissenschaft’ is broader than that of ‘science’ (in its contemporary usage) and incorporates both the natural sciences and academic inquiry in general. For the sake of consistency, however, ‘Wissenschaft’ will generally be translated by ‘science’ here – TR.

⁴⁹ Herodotus, Histories, ed. James Romm, trans. Pamela Mensch (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2014), 117–18.

⁵⁰ Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2 (London: William Heinemann, 1965), VIII, 3.

⁵¹ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Robert Pippin and Adrian del Caro, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 57.

⁵² The MTT is the ‘ancestral’. Cf. the so-called speculative realism of Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009), 10. Meillassoux later states, with regard to what he calls the ‘principle of factiality’, that the key task is, ‘to derive, as a Figure of factiality, the capacity, proper to every mathematical statement, through which the latter is capable of formulating a possibility that can be absolutized, even if only hypothetically. It is a question of absolutizing “the” mathematical just as we absolutized “the” logical by grasping in the fundamental criterion for every mathematical statement a necessary condition for the contingency of every entity’ (ibid., 126). It is important here to stress that the universal movement of technology.capital.medium does not presuppose human beings; it produces them. In this regard, then, the notion of the ‘necessary contingency of every entity’ has to be rejected. What Meillassoux terms ‘contingency’ is a ‘figure’ of absolute possibility. The latter, however, only makes possible one effect in every cause. This effect is absolutely determined. Furthermore, I would argue, with Spinoza, that the human being is immanent to universality as such. Even if the human being only appears ‘later’ on in the unfolding of this universality, it is already contained in its original organization. The opposition between ‘correlationism’ and ‘speculative realism’ is thus a false dichotomy.

⁵³ Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso Books, 1995), 78 (translation modified – TR).

⁵⁴ Plato, Timaeus, 53e–56a.

⁵⁵ Luce Irigaray, ‘Plato’s Hystera’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 243–364.

⁵⁶ Aristotle, Physics, 192a13.

⁵⁷ In concrete political terms, the priority of the TCM universal is indicated by the different ways in which democratic countries approach human rights abuses in different countries. China and Saudi Arabia, for example, are not treated in quite the same way as small, economically insignificant countries. Furthermore, human rights questions are also factored into economic calculations. China, which generally regards the discourse on human rights as a form of Western hegemony, always indicates its readiness to talk when there may be an economic advantage in doing so. In the world of Realpolitik, human rights are always – and perhaps only – a rhetorical, i.e. pragmatic figure.

⁵⁸ ‘Pluritas non est ponenda sine necessitate.’ ‘Plurality should not be posited without necessity’ (William of Ockham, ‘Scriptum in Primum Librum Sententiarum, Prologus, Quaestio 1’, in Opera Theologica [New York: Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University, 1967], 67). For Ockham, this is an economic principle of reason. Applied to the TCM universal, it states that the possibilities it contains are essentially limited. This is particularly evident where the normalization of the subject is concerned. For Ockham, who is only acquainted with individuals, there is essentially no multiplicity, but only plurality. Unlike technology, God produces without a model. He creates every concrete, individual thing directly. For the Christian philosopher, then, God is no technician – or only a very special kind of technician.

⁵⁹ In his ‘Logic of Being’, Hegel thus states that ‘the alterations of being in general are not only the passing over of a magnitude into another magnitude, but the transition from the qualitative into the quantitative and contrariwise’ (Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 322). Hegel’s examples are the ‘leap’ from birth to death and the freezing of water.

⁶⁰ The primary form of freedom enjoyed by the universal subject consists in the power of disposal made possible by money. Freedom here is the freedom of a qualitatively distinct kind of movement, a qualitatively distinct kind of employment and application of technological objects. This is why the surveillance of this power of disposal (whether in the virtual public domain of the internet or the real public domain of the shopping mall) is not experienced as a loss of freedom as long as it goes unnoticed. As long as the subject’s use of her power of disposal remains undisturbed, it continues to afford an experience of freedom. Is such a disturbance then a prerequisite of our reflection on this experience? This is the case when we experience poverty as a form of disturbance or dis-ability. I experience my lack of freedom when I meet someone who is richer and freer, someone whose freedom I cannot match due to my poverty. Poverty disturbs. This is why there is no friendship between rich and poor. The freedom of the one who is more free is continually inhibited by the one who is merely free. (In friendship it is another kind of freedom that is in question.)

⁶¹ Cf. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. Tom Bottomore, trans. David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1978). Simmel captures this idea in the claim that ‘ownership’ is a form of ‘acting with and upon’ objects (321). He locates this ‘ownership’ in the ‘will’: ‘The fact that one can ‘do what one wishes’ with an object is not only a consequence of ownership but actually means that one owns it’ (322). It is in this sense that wealth or prosperity is freedom. Nevertheless, the role of the ‘will’ should not be overestimated here. The ‘will’ – need and pleasure – is only a vehicle for the movement of the TCM universal. This is already indicated by the fact that it is forbidden for the ‘will’ not to participate in the TCM universal.

⁶² Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 108.

⁶³ In everyday usage, the German ‘es gibt’ (literally, ‘it gives’) means simply ‘there is’ or ‘there are’. Yet since its literal sense plays an important role in what follows (and particularly in Chapter 4), it is left untranslated here and in similar contexts – TR.