Visualising the Empire of Capital

Martyn Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429516382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Methods of visualising modernity and capitalism have been central to classical social science. Those methods of seeing, specifically in the work of Marx, were attempts to capture visually the fragmenting edifice of capital in its death throes and were part of a project to hasten its demise - yet capitalism persisted and perpetuated itself in new forms, such that its demise now looks less likely than it did 150 years ago. This book argues for a new way of understanding Marx and a new way of approaching both capitalist modernity and Marx's Capital by rethinking the nature of vision. Through studies of visualisation in relation to machines and the monstrous, memory, mirrors and optics, and the invisible, Visualising the Empire of Capital offers a new way of thinking about what capital is and its future. A new reading of - and against - Marx, this volume argues for new forms of sensual utopia while initiating antagonism to the empire of capital itself. As such, it will appeal to social theorists, social anthropologists and sociologists with interests in critical theory, visual culture and aesthetics.

Chapter 1

Camera obscura

Optics of modernity

In the first chapter we examine the actuality and the metaphor of the camera obscura and its visual significance for social theory. From Zahn’s image of the camera to the discussion by Marx and Engels in the German Ideology, the metaphor of the camera obscura has signified inversion, refraction, and the use and eclipse of light. Nabokov and Barthes both used the metaphor to reflect the nature of their period and the latter specifically invoked the photograph as a way of thinking about the scopic regimes of modernity. Theorists such as Sarah Kofman have used the camera obscura metaphor in order to think through the nature of the modern project. The chapter closes by thinking about the nature of the spectacle and the spectacular.

Sight is never innocent, it never exists in and of itself but is embedded in cultures of seeing and in technologies of seeing. Often our capacity for sight is enhanced by instrumentation: the construction of machines which make our seeing more effective (the telescope), make us see in different ways or see different things (the microscope), or allow us to document that which we are seeing (the camera). The complex interactions of sight with cultures that permit or shape certain ways of seeing and technologies alert us to the fact that every different social formation has different ways of visualising the world and indeed itself. Understanding the subjective phenomenologies of ‘seeing’ the social world means understanding what is possible to see from such a vantage point and what is not clear to us.

Indeed every society has its own opia: its specific, historically and geographically determined defects of the eye. Reading modernity visually is therefore a complex exercise in understanding the possibilities and limitations of vision in a specific epoch and practising ways in which that epoch, in our case the empire of capital, can be envisioned through our cultures and through the technical apparatus available to us for that task. If we are indeed myopic then this is both a biologically and socially determined defect or set of defects in our vision. Aiming to see the invisible – and there is much that is invisible in a social formation – alerts us to the presence of both the senses and the sensual technologies that are available to us and to something else which is entwined and beyond our vision: our capacity to imagine and to move through abstract levels of ‘visualisation’ even when we cannot literally see those abstractions or they remain opaque to us. It might even be the case that the more myopic we are the more effectively we can imagine that which is not given to us optically within the range of our sight. Having the capacity to imagine where we actually are might also allow us to catch sight of where we are going and perhaps even change the direction of our movements. In this sense can we actually ‘see’ where we are and where we are going?

Roland Barthes has written of the eye as a ‘globular object’ signifying whiteness and rotundity as a material form (1981c: 240–241). It is both object and device, and one which is subject to the gaze of others. Eye-sight entails questions of the invisible, the opaque, the intransparent, the reflective. It might also allow us retrospection to see somehow where we have been or indeed could never, historically, have been. This retrospection may not have been available to those who endured or lived through the empirical reality of a specific formation. We may have a privileged, retrospective visualisation of archaic social formations whether through the ‘seeing-through’ of archaeological sedimentation or in the photographic documents encapsulating the social memory of earlier peoples. This again is a question both of culture and technique. New methods of visualisation which can see backwards in retrospect can also perhaps allow us to see forwards prospectively and allow us to see and even capture new kinds of prefigurations in the interstices of our civilisation. These interstitial prefigurations are not quite empirical, material or actual. They are projects and products of our imagination but none the less as real as being able to imagine a city that one has not empirically and subjectively experienced. One’s opia may be able to ‘see’ a Dhaka which ‘exists’ or indeed a new social formation which does not ‘exist’ as an entity in the same way.

Where then is the importance, the gravity, of the visual to be located? Is the visual simply about the tangible, the empirical and the concrete? Can we think of the sensorial and the visual as determined by history or history as determined by its modes of optics and techniques? Can we think at all of a visual modernity? Hans Jonas has written, in his philosophy of biological organisms and the biological eye, of theory and the visual field as a field of simultaneity, neutralisation and distance (1954: 507). What this means, for Jonas, is that the visual appears to us as we open our eyes and see it immediately arrayed before us. Yet at the same time as it is simultaneous there is a neutralisation of our relationship with the object we are perceiving. We do not need to have a physical and material relationship of touch with that object: a haptics of engagement. We also see the visual in a field of distance and one which is potentially infinite. For Jonas:

Sight is par excellence the sense of the simultaneous or the coordinated, and thereby of the extensive. A view comprehends many things juxtaposed, as co-existent parts of one field of vision. It does so in an instant: as in a flash one glance, an opening of the eyes, discloses a world of co-present qualities spread out in space, ranged in depth, continuing into indefinite distance, suggesting, if any direction in their static order, then by their perspective a direction away from the subject rather than towards it.

(1954: 507)

The disclosing of the world, a neutral world, literally unfolds into the distance before us. We do nothing to the object and the object does nothing to us. There is no ‘commerce’ between the perceiving eye and the perceived object (1954: 519). Even as the object becomes a phenomenal presence to us so vision is profoundly different from touch. What implications then does this have for the eye enmeshed in the abstract structures of capital? Can capital not touch the eye, have commerce with it, the eye not profoundly affect and infect capital itself?

Capital and alternative modernities

The idea of modernity as a singular and unitary phenomenon has been displaced by the focus on a variety of modernities and the reassertion of the very different manners in which humans have historically and geographically experienced those modernities. Often modernity as a concept has paralleled the notion of capitalism or the capitalist mode of production. Indeed Engels himself wrote of Marx’s Capital as itself defining the economic formation which it reflected upon. In this sense a mere book came to define the entire social formation of which it was a part. It was, as Engels said, an ‘epoch-making work’ (1975: 7). We have examined elsewhere specific definitions of modernity and the human experience of the modern (Hudson 2016), including the production of phantasms in capitalism (Hudson 2017a), of the subjugation of other species (Hudson 2017b) and the emergence of the specifically ‘modern’ human experience (Hudson 2018a, 2018b). Yet there is a certain degree of social and sociological myopia about the nature of those formations and specifically their origin, definition and fates. Indeed the idea of being able to ‘see’ those formations is problematic.

This visual history of capital is enmeshed in the methods which allow us to see those formations. Often, in the search for origins for example, these methods use the metaphors of etymology, archaeology and genealogy in order to address the ascent (or descent) of capitalism. So we think of offering a metaphorical genealogy of capital. It is equally the case, however, that these methodologies might offer us practical ways of understanding the emergence of capital; the etymology of specific words related to hand-milling, the industrial archaeology of the metropolis, the genealogy of the Fuggers and other mercantile families. These metaphors and non-metaphors of descent, trajectory and emerging futures are literally a ‘carrying-over’ of sense. Indeed the sensorial visions try to make them appear as apprehensible formations, objects and histories. The metaphors also shake our confidence in being able to ‘see’ entire social formations, world histories and the multiplicity of human experience. Our visions of the past might be distorted by the remnants and artefacts left behind to us and which we can ‘empirically’ see. It may be that the entirety of methodologies of historical practice are somehow astigmatic: offering us refractive errors which cloud our vision or make us look in the wrong place.

The modern begins in a specific space and time. There are prefigurations, intimations, anticipations of it reaching back into antiquity. The modern expands with capital and the three revolutions of the plough, sword and book. Counter-modernities and rival modernities included tests and sites of experimentation which might anticipate new future social forms. Sometimes in the interstitial cracks of civilisations new prefigurative forms emerged. Rival modernities do secede and abdicate from capital: monstrous, hybrid entities and formations which can only go backwards into capital because they have no powers of compulsion except that of political will and coercion. These cannot initiate new future directions beyond capital except into dead ends: these formations in this time of monsters are sterile. Indeed they might have their own light and luminescence: like the electrification of the Soviet Union. They extended and accelerated compulsions towards domination and control.

In so far as the modern begins in specific spaces and times so the future anticipations emerge in the same manner; new logics, evolutionary routes, ways of thinking, material practices. Like early capitalist social formations they are difficult to locate and document because we do not understand the kinds of social forms which will come after us and ours. Nations, borders are defensive formations creating a stasis, a bulwark against movement. Where are the breaks and fractures in the ‘continuum’ of history, as Benjamin might note? Those nation-states are often raft-states, standing against extinction in the human camps from other human camps or even natural forces of destruction. If we take self-determination, self-definition, self-destination seriously then we build the world of interstitial spaces: these might be the new anticipations of the future (see Hudson 2017b). How the concept and practice of sight helps us to understand our time of monsters we return to in the third chapter.

Regimes of seeing

David Michael Levin has documented the advent and rise of the ‘ocularcentric’ social formation: a social world which privileges vision and the visual above the other senses, one which emerges in antiquity. As he writes: ‘Can it be demonstrated that, beginning with the ancient Greeks, our western culture has been dominated by an ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision-centered interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality?’ (1993: 2). Levin’s phenomenology has traced the seeing body in ocularecentric modernity including the understanding of whose eye is ‘ultimately master’ (1993: 27). The panoptic eye of social power is obviously discernable in a modernity obsessed with observing its populations, recording them and disciplining them. The idea of the ocularcentric society or culture is one which privileges vision and dispels other forms of knowing or experiencing whether that be hearing and other senses or in religious or spiritual encounters with other non-observable types of being like gods or angels. Ocularcentrism makes the seeing eye the most powerful mode of experience and organises its society on that basis whether through reading or writing, or in the way the empirical, exterior world is mediated to us in pictures, film and photographs. But what was it about the classical Greek world that began to privilege vision over the sonorities and auralities of divines speaking in our ears? It may be the case that certain moments are fracture points in terms of cognitive revolutions (see Hudson 2018b). The emergence, historically, of certain ways of thinking about envisioning the world in the classical period have defined European, and by extension, global cultures and they may have subjugated and suppressed not just other sensorial cultures but also other visual cultures. Ocularcentrism and its dispersal of other types of sensorial phenomenology and technics has become the defining condition of the new empire of capital as an empire of the senses or certain ways of perceiving the senses. That empire itself was prefigured in the classical world and its regimes of seeing and organising. This is not to say that other social formations have not also been defined by ocularcentrism, but there are direct lineages in European cultures which are rooted in the archaic social formations of Ancient Greece and which have been noted by Cornelius Castoriadis specifically (1991: 19).

The embodied hermeneutics of seeing and its regimes of limitation and possibility are explored by De Certeau (1984) in his visualisation and embedded experience of the metropolis of New York and its patterns of consumption. The products of capital and consumption are not, for De Certeau, easy to visualise:

They are all the less visible because the networks framing them are becoming more and more tightly woven, flexible, and totalitarian. They are thus protean in form, blending in with their surroundings, and liable to disappear into the colonizing organizations whose products leave no room where the consumers can mark their activity.

(1984: 31)

These are, therefore, not just dominant orders of seeing but practices of not seeing and repression (1984: 41).

De Certeau revels in the vision of the world unfolding before him from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center (a vision that we have now been deprived of). Even here the mobility of the city stops before our eyes as the sight struggles to apprehend the totality of the city. For De Certeau:

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passing over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes.

(1984: 91)

The totality of the city can be read as a world composed of ‘a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production’ (1984: 91). This entire ‘cosmos’ seen by De Certeau as he looks upon its heights, is a cosmos where one looks down upon totality. These heights become, for him, a new landscape where Daedalus and Icarus play and revel amongst the skyscrapers before the vision of a god (1984: 92). These visions are the ‘imaginary totalizations produced by the eye’ where the World Trade Center stands as the symbol of what De Certeau calls the ‘atopia-utopia of optical knowledge’ standing above the urban landscape and population (1984: 93) which is itself the city as universal subject (1984: 94). The universal subject of metropolitan New York becomes the apotheosis of an entire imperial civilisation of capital and consumption. The ‘cosmos’ of this empire is revealed to De Certeau precisely because it is only intelligible and surveyable from the heights of the architectures made possible by capital and indeed metaphorically captured in the name of the Center itself.

Jonathan Crary has historicised these new optical regimes in his analysis of the reorganisation of vision in the early nineteeenth century. Crary writes of more and more abstract regimes of vision relocating vision away from the perceiving eye. For Crary: ‘Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real”, optically perceived world’ (1992: 1–2). Crary writes of breaks in the epistemes of vision whereby some visualities persist, others die, others co-exist in new tensions. The supplanting of older regimes and organisations of seeing is part of a set of revolutions beginning in new relationships of observation at the turn of the nineteenth century (1992: 2–3). The exact location, historically and geographically, of this break makes intelligible our sense of modernity in the two centuries which follow. For Crary:

How and where one situates such a break has an enormous bearing on the intelligibility of visuality within nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity. Most existing answers to this question suffer from an exclusive preoccupation with problems of visual representation; the break with classical models of vision in the early nineteenth century was far more than simply a shift in the appearance of images and art works, or in systems of representational conventions. Instead, it was inseparable from a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad ways the productive, cognitive, and desiring capacities of the human subject.

(1992: 3)

Crary argues that it is the focus on the observing position which makes intelligible that revolution as part of process of subjection and of subjectification (1992: 5).

The reorganisation of vision in the early nineteenth century was part of the dislocation of vision away from the ‘stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura’ (1992: 14). The nature of the camera obscura intimates the supplanting and dissolution of the ‘truth’ of the referent as well as the stable observing gaze. For Crary:

If the camera obscura, as a concept, subsisted as an objective ground of visual truth, a variety of discourses and practices – in philosophy, science, and in procedures of social normalization – tend to abolish the foundations of that ground in the early nineteenth century. In a sense, what occurs is a new valuation of visual experience: it is given an unprecedented mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding site or referent.

(1992: 14)

The subjectification of the new observing body is a pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Sight, lucidity and the empire of capital
• 1. Camera obscura: Optics of modernity
• 2. Visuality in capital
• 3. Machines, monsters and capital
• 4. The Crystal Palace
• 5. The burning library: Memory and seeing machines
• 6. Reading the invisible in Capital
• 7. The dark forest: Trees, space and time
• Conclusion: Senses and counter-capital
• References
• Index