nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

question of ‘composition’ between forces which remain external to one another(as in physics) or of ‘combination’ between elements who become one(as in chemistry). Rather it is a question of ‘teleologies’, of self-reproducingprocesses (as in biology). 38 This is different from seamless harmonious organicismin at least two sense: For Hegel chemistry and biology do not abolishphysics, but merely harness its forces by suspending their opposition, whileorganisms themselves are contradictory processes, which are dynamic and‘alive’ precisely in so far as they never coincide with themselves, are neverwhole. This means that even within Hegel we find space for talking aboutsomething like a ‘micro-physics of power’ which resists and subtends any teleologicalprocess of totalisation, while such a process itself must be thoughtof as contradictory, prone to crisis and antagonism. 39However, the body of capital is no ordinary organic body, a self-reproducinglife sustaining itself in an ecology. Capital’s teleology is not concreteand biological but historical and abstract. In Kantian terms capital does notoperate as a ‘self-organised being’ according to its own ‘intrinsic’ or ‘natural’telos, but according to an extrinsic or final goal. 40 It is centred and driven by afinal end: its teleological mission is its expanded self-reproduction – M-C-M’,or money makes more money! – which requires the exploitation of bodies,and the violent conversion of any ecology into an objectified environment,either an externality or a resource. 41 Capital’s subsumption of our bodies displaysan abstract striving, a super-sensible and thus insatiable hunger, whichdemands the blood and the flesh of our bodies, the lives and materials of theworld. Capital is thus an inorganic teleology pursuing its goal at any cost toour earthly lives and measuring everything according to its abstract credo.Capital, in these abstract terms, is an automaton positing itself in total disregardfor any intrinsic telos (any life, project or desire 42 ) it cannot render productivefor itself, of any ecology it cannot carve up and commodify, coloniseand privatise. But as the crisis has shown, it is a curious automaton, relianton the support of central banks, police forces and scaremongering media toprop it up....the debt economy and ‘self-organisation’In recent decades, with the help of human reasource management and debt,capital has multiplied its ways of subsuming and simulating ‘intrinsic teloses’(or desires, projects, and aims) in ways where the proletarian compulsion towork comes to appear as a voluntary choice of self-realisation against boringwage-labour – in self-employment, freelancing, entrepreneurship. 43 Ratherthan a direct ‘total real subsumption’ of labour this round of subsumption212