The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

102 The passage from modernity to postmodernityof money as the proper object of desire? Baudrillard depicts postmodernculture as an 'excremental culture,' and money=excrementin both Baudrillard's and Freud's view (some hints of that sentimentcan be found in Marx). Postmodern concerns for the signifier ratherthan the signified, the medium (money) rather than the message(social labour), the emphasis on fiction rather than function, on signsrather than things, on aesthetics rather than ethics, suggest a reinforcementrather than a transformation of the role of money as Marxdepicts it.As commodity producers seeking money, however, we are dependentupon the needs and capacity of others to buy. Producers consequentlyhave a permanent interest in cultivating 'excess and intemperance'in others, in feeding 'imaginary appetites' to the pointwhere ideas of what constitutes social need are replaced by 'fantasy,caprice, and whim.' The capitalist producer increasingly 'plays thepimp' between the consumers and their sense of need, excites inthem 'morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of [their] weaknesses -all so that he can demand the cash for this service of love.' Pleasure,leisure, seduction, and erotic life are all brought within the range ofmoney power and commodity production. Capitalism therefore'produces sophistication of needs and of their means on the onehand, and a bestial barbarization, a complete, unrefined, and abstractsimplicity of need, on the other' (Marx, 1964, 148). Advertising andcommercialization destroy all traces of production in their imagery,reinforcing the fetishism that arises automatically in the course ofmarket exchange.Furthermore, money, as the supreme representation of socialpower in capitalist society, itself becomes the object of lust, greed,and desire. Yet here, too, we encounter double meanings. Moneyconfers the privilege to exercise power over others - we can buytheir labour time or the services they offer, even build systematicrelations of domination over exploited classes simply through controlover money power. Money, in fact, fuses the political and the economicinto a genuine political economy of overwhelming power relations(a problem that micro-theorists of power like Foucault systematicallyavoid and which macro-social theorists like Giddens - withhis strict division between allocative and authoritative sources ofpower - cannot grasp). The common material languages of moneyand commodities provide a universal basis within market capitalismfor linking everyone into an identical system of market valuation andso procuring the reproduction of social life through an objectivelygrounded system of social bonding. Yet within these broad constraints,we are 'free,' as it were, to develop our own personalities andM oderniz ation 103relationships in our own way, our own 'otherness,' even to forgegroup language games, provided, of course, that we have enoughmoney to live on satisfactorily. Money is a 'great leveller and cynic,'a powerful underminer of fixed social relations, and a great 'democratizer'.As a social power that can be held by individual persons itforms the basis for a wide-ranging individual liberty, a liberty thatcan be deployed to develop ourselves as free-thinking individualswithout reference to others. Money unifies precisely through itscapacity to accommodate individualism, otherness, and extraordinarysocial fragmentation.But by what process is the capacity for fragmentation latent inthe money form transformed into a necessary feature of capitalistmodernization?Participation in market exchange presupposes a certain division oflabour as well as a capacity to separate (alienate) oneself from one'sown product. The result is an estrangement from the product ofone's own experience, a fragmentation of social tasks and a separationof the subjective meaning of a process of production from the objectivemarket valuation of the product. A highly organized technicaland social division of labour, though by no means unique to capitalism,is one of the founding principles of capitalist modernization. Thisforms a powerful lever to promote economic growth and the accumulationof capital, particularly under conditions of market exchangein which individual commodity producers (protected by privateproperty rights) can explore the possibilities of specialization withinan open economic system. This explains the power of economic (freemarket) liberalism as a founding doctrine for capitalism. It is preciselyin such a context that possessive individualism and creative entrepreneurialism,innovation, and speculation, can flourish, even thoughthis also means a proliferating fragmentation of tasks and responsibilities,and a necessary transformation of social relations to thepoint where producers are forced to view others in purely instrumentalterms.But there is much more to capitalism than commodity productionand market exchange. Certain historical conditions - in particular,the existence of wage labour - are required before profit-seeking -launching money into circulation in order to gain more money -can become the basic way for social life to be reproduced. Based onthe violent separation of the mass of the direct producers fromcontrol over the means of production, the emergence of wage labour- persons who have to sell labour power in order to live - is the'result of many revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series ofolder forms of production' (Capital, 1: 166-7). The sense of a