'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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F. Jameson on finance capital
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August 28, 2011
In his essay Culture and Finance Capital in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 Frederic Jameson refers to Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, who he says, shows us, there comes a moment in which the logic of capitalism - faced with the saturation of local and even foreign markets - determines an abandonment of that kind of specific production, along with its factories and trained workforce, and, leaving them behind in ruins, takes its flight to other more profitable ventures. Hence we have the recent shift to finance capital.
Jameson says:
Now this free-floating capital, on its frantic search for more profitable investments (a process prophetically described for the US as long ago as Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital of 1965) will begin to live its life in a new context; no longer in the factories and the spaces of extraction and production, but on the floor of the stock market, jostling for more intense profitability, but not as one industry competing with another branch, nor even one productive technology against another more advanced one in the same line of manufacturing, but rather in the form of speculation itself: spectres of value, as Derrida might put it, vying against each other in a vast world-wide disembodied phantasmagoria.
He adds that this might be dramatically heightened, for our own period, by a reminder of the results of the cybernetic 'revolution':
might be dramatically heightened, for our own period, by a reminder of the results of the cybernetic 'revolution', the intensification of communications technology to the point at which capital transfers today abolishes space and time and can be virtually instantaneously effectuated from one national zone to another. The results of these lightning-like movements of immense quantities of money around the globe are incalculable, yet already have clearly produced new kinds of political blockage and also new and unrepresentable symptoms in late-capitalist everyday life.
Globalization is a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerialization, as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world.
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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:38 PM | Permalink |
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