In the world of analogy (which is, among other things, the world of qualities) we come across digital emissaries (gold), and in the world of digitality (which is, among other things, the world of quantities) we come across analogical emissaries (gold).
First case: “What does a solely quantitative difference between things presuppose? The identity of their qualities. Hence, the quantitative measure of labors presupposes the equivalence, the identity of their quality.” But, in order to represent convention (therefore the suppression of qualities), we cannot rely, at first, on something conventional (paper money): we need a material that becomes more and more precious as it gets closer to eliminating the differentiating qualities, something closer to pure exchangeability. The digital emissaries present in gold are divisibility, uniformity, and invariability (“the only qualities necessary to make a measure of value a perfect one are, that it should itself have value, and that that value should be itself invariable,” writes Ricardo: but one single quality is sufficient to compromise the realm of quantity). And Marx is irritated by those naïve people who fail to understand this: “The study of the precious metals as subjects of the money relations, as incarnations of the latter, is therefore by no means a matter lying outside the realm of political economy, as Proudhon believes, any more than the physical composition of paint, and of marble, lie outside the realm of painting and sculpture.” Finally: “The precious metals uniform in their physical qualities, so that equal quantities of them should be so far identical as to present no ground for preferring this one to the others. Not the case, for example, with equal numbers of cattle and equal quantities of grain.”
Second case: gold as analogical emissary in the digital world. With gradual surprise, we come to realize that the process that eliminates qualities, constantly referred to by Marx throughout Grundrisse and Das Kapital, is constantly being compared to the process of alchemy, which produces qualities. C-M-C and M-C-M (where C and M stand for “commodity” and “money”) are the economic translations of caput mortuum and quinta essentia, and money replaces the lapis: “It is exactly as if, for example, the chance discovery of a stone gave me mastery over all the sciences, regardless of my individuality. The possession of money places me in exactly the same relationship to wealth (social) as the philosophers’ stone would to the sciences.” Thus even here, on alien ground, gold maintains all its mighty array of solar and regal associations, as the vibrant center of a hierarchic system of correspondences. At the center of a neuter, undifferentiated and conventional place we find the most ancient splendor.
For century after century all things, all beings, appeared and moved about accompanied by their Double. At one time, indeed, the dominant presence was the Double, of which the individual being was a mere sign. Doubles then slowly began to fade, to dwindle. Finally they sought refuge in the nocturnal part of nature and let themselves be seen as sporadic and sinister presences. But new Doubles, of another species, began to spread. This species was exchange value, which multiplied and superimposed itself on the forms of all things. And there was indeed a Double that immediately transformed itself into a thing, without there being a corresponding body. This was money. And this peculiar lack of a body to which to attach itself gave it a longer life. “All commodities are perishable money; money is the imperishable commodity.”
There are two movements:
a: All is usable material. The subject is a procedure. Absolute conventionalism. What acts is the void that fixes the terms of the experimentation. It marks out the object and works upon it.
b: All is associated. Universal interdependence. Resonance. Touching one element affects all its kin. But which are its kin? This implies an earlier wisdom, a canon of doctrine.
We cannot do without either of the two movements, in any of their forms. In the “tribal” phase (namely b), Marx takes the view that a is hidden, but is present and working away as an ineluctable corrosive. In the post-historical phase, only the action of a is recognized, while b leads a wild and clandestine life, but nevertheless radiates its power over everything.
Money is the sign of representing, the sign of predominance achieved by the system of representation (i.e., the system of convention, of substitution, of replacement, of interchangeability) over the system of correspondences (i.e., the system of analogy, of symbol [in the cultic sense], of nondiscursiveness, of association, of uniqueness). Marx’s discovery refers to this: to the transition of exchange value from peripheral and marginal power to primary and central power in the modern world, its transition to capital power. All forms of life now bear the mark of this process: everything is under the sign of exchange value. Once this transition and its implications have been fully understood, all talk about structures and superstructures is pure blabla (a word invented by Céline), ready for use in the Soviet Encyclopedia: there is no need whatsoever for a superstructure that corresponds to some kind of conditioning structure. It’s enough to say that all is under the sign of the exchange value, and that the exchange value is the economic name for a power that otherwise manifests itself in substitution, in convention, in representation in general, in all its various forms.
Exchange value is a character always present, but is always somewhat hidden and always somewhat incidental or peripheral to reality, a character that has long lived “in the pores of society,” like the Jew; a character who—for Marx—is the Jew in every society. Over several centuries (and Marx follows it from Ancient Greece to industrial Europe and as far as Balzac) it becomes the ultimate character of all reality, to which everything relates, the basis of perception, which permeates every detail. That world in which things have to be exchangeable in order to exist is the world that Marx, and only Marx, has fully described in all the phases of its alchemical process. It is the world in which we naturally continue living, that cloaks us all the time with an invisible film. Marx is immensely helpful for us, not because of his crude, humanistic, repellent, inflated, barroom conceptions of social justice, of what ought to happen, but because of his invaluable description of the society of substitution, of exchange, as it is—today, now, everywhere, in the fixity of its perpetual expansion.
When real estate and landed property begins to be encompassed by money, the Immutable recognizes its own subjection to the mutable power of exchange. The emblematic transition is already perceivable in the writings of a seventeenth-century pamphleteer, Edward Misselden: “… where before mony was invented, there was an Exchange, or Permutation in moveable and mutable things onely, as Corne, Wine, Oile, and the like: and afterwards in immoveable and immutable things, as Houses, Lands and the like; there was a necessity of mony, to value such things with mony as could not be exchanged. And so by degrees all things came to bee valued with money, and mony the value of all things.” If everything is divisible (insofar as everything is translatable into money, and money is divisible), then nothing inalienable exists any longer. And what is indivisible? Quality. But quality, since it is part of an object, is subject to the rule that applies to all objects, namely that they are translatable into price. And so, at most, it will produce a higher price. Quality becomes luxury—and as such controllable, divisible, and exchangeable. Prestige, which was the origin of all value, the primordial exuberance, becomes the value of what is superfluous.
Quality: heir of prestige. The unit for measuring prestige is unascertainable. Prestige is a power that is displayed: through emblems, ordeals, minglings with other forces. We have no unit for measuring force, or at least the force that Giordano Bruno was still dealing with, but was no longer of concern to Newton.
The closure of the cavity of images, as soon as the “money-crystal,” Geldkristall, is set into it, would seem to herald an invasion of images into immediate reality, a coniunctio that would lead back to the origin. But this doesn’t happen: the money-crystal refracts only the images of circulation (commodities), whereas its hidden face—which looks out onto the world of images like a porthole onto the ocean—is opaque: on that side the money-crystal offers only a total closure. The opposite occurs among the units of circulation: when money—the crystal set in the empty cavity of circulation, like a “universal equivalent”—is introduced among them, it produces changes that reverberate on the whole boundless range of commodities. These commodities, which until then could assume any form, must now be regulated; they have to fulfill at least three requirements:
a) to be divisible at will: as opposed to uniqueness;
b) to be uniform in their single parts: as opposed to what is composite;
c) to be identical in every specimen: as opposed to the difference.
The light from the crystal, upon refraction, imposes its own characteristics on everything that seeks to be transformed in it. And this means radically changing the status of images in circulation: from fetishes—unique, irreplaceable, and exclusive concretions of power—they become things that are above all replaceable, whose virtue lies in their replaceability. And yet—and here, once again, black magic comes into play—the spell of the fetish is not lost: it now encompasses not only the single circulating images, but the whole process.
Money provides the clearest example of inversion: the world becomes too esoteric. All hypostatic images tend to become autonomous, but now such images actually become objects: money becomes tangible currency, a crumpled banknote. The image thus asserts a position of excessive power, actually transforming itself into a thing, whereas before it was a simple invisible mental presence. But, from the moment in which that thing exists, the doorway leading to the realm of images is closed. Money comes to occupy that single empty place in the circulation of the real (“It always stays behind at a point in the arena of circulation vacated by the commodities”). This hole that provided access to images: “We have already seen that the sphere of circulation has a hole in it, through which gold (or silver, or the money material in general) enters as a commodity with a given value. Hence, when money begins to function as a measure of value, when it is used to determine prices, its value is presupposed.” That cavity is now closed: it is sealed by a sparkling crystal. All metamorphoses are directed to that point, and from it they rebound back: they can no longer refer to occurrences that take place beyond those metamorphoses, since everything now happens on this side, between their fluid material and the crystal, between the crystal and the multiplicity of forms.
“The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a money-crystal.” What is happening? A certain relationship between subjects, namely the circulation of goods, produces a natural deposit, a concretion, a crystalline commodity that reflects all other commodities and becomes essential for their circulation. This crystal is not an image: it exists as an object—and, as an object, the properties of the global process of circulation of goods are attributed to it. A double inversion, a chassé-croisé, a movement of money back and forth: a thing is invented as a concretion of a process, attributing to that thing the characteristics of the process: the characteristics of the thing have an effect upon a whole indefinite series of units of the process (commodities). The money-crystal becomes a single subject, but its uniqueness represents replaceability itself. A further paradox of inversion: the modern fetish is not just what appears to be unique, but what is replaceable, reproducible, alienable, to the highest degree. Hence Baudelaire’s fascination with prostitution. Prostitution is a guarantee of total alienability, just as the sacred protected the untouchable. In the age of inversion, the sacred is protected by its own prostitution.
“Where money is not itself the community, it must dissolve the community.” With the transition of exchange value to a position of predominance, with the inversion of the predominant relationship between commodity and money (from C-M-C to M-C-M), money becomes the community, it embodies in one subject that nexus rerum which would now be indecipherable in the world outside it, in the world of “horrid chance.” This is how inversion is applied here: the very agent of the Convention inherits the function of the Canon, it takes on the dignity and the powers of the order it has undermined.