Marx and Karatani: Asymmetrical Capitalism – International

Conference – Brief Proposal Sketch

Initiator/Convenor of the Conference: Shannee Marks, in

cooperation/association with Ferda Keskin, Comparative Literature, Bilgi
University, and Abbas Vali, Ceren Özselçuk, Bülent Küçük, Sociology
Department, Bogaziçi University

Preamble

Karatani’s transcritique is negatively grounded in an elemental position of

asymmetry. Perhaps a ‘natural’ position for a Japanese philosopher in
particular vis-à-vis the West and its modernity. Modernity for Japan always
implied at the same time its rejection or an “overcoming modernity”. Marx’s
critique of political economy, his discovery of the value form is also grounded
in asymmetries, in the groundless terrain of the parallax.
Asymmetry or disequilibrium affects capitalism’s most primitive elements: for
instance the relation of buying and selling is not symmetrical nor one between
equals nor of equivalents. It is asymmetrical. The selling position is the
exposed one – and the immanent source of crises in capitalism stems from the
necessity that the capitalist must also periodically/continually stand in the
selling position – in Marx’s terms – to realize value.
“The asymmetrical relationship of selling-buying shadows every field or
domain of inquiry – art, science, religion. Any thought that despises
secularness, or the asymmetrical relationship, is absorbed into metaphysics.”
(Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor Language, Number, Money, MIT,
1995, p. 162) Karatani’s basic insight into the asymmetry of exchange – what
Marx called the “mysteriousness of the equivalent form” - has inestimable
consequences for a neoliberal theory of the market or market economy and all
other derivatives of an equilibrated notion of capitalism. The general formula
of capital – M-C-M’ – must pass through the abyss of selling – the more
ordinary ‘consumption’ formula is likewise exposed – C-M-C – especially in
the case of the commodity of labour power. Classical economists are
Platonists who say “(…) commodities are exchangeable because of their
 Marx and Karatani: Asymmetrical Capitalism

common essence, and thus selling equals buying. This amounts to saying that
there is no such thing as selling.” (ibid. p. 163) Karatani locates an asymmetry
or inequality already in the relation of seller and buyer – whereas neoliberal
even Marxist tinged economics such as that of David Harvey – presume an
equal exchange, which only at its conclusion results in an inequality – profit.
“But values are established by an exchange process which rests on the
principle of equivalence. How can capitalists realize an inequality, ∆ M,
through an exchange process which presupposes equivalence? Where, in
short, does profit come from under conditions of fair exchange?” (David
Harvey, The Limits to Capital, London, 2006, p.22) In the same book various
forms of the word equilibrium or equilibrate appear 100 times.

Capital, although in perpetual immanent disequilibrium, on the other hand

‘appears’ as a force of general reason - here Karatani’s transcritique reads
Marx with Kant and Kant through Marx – and as in Kant’s critique of pure
reason – capital like reason is possessed of a drive to exceed its own limits,
akin at its extreme to a Freudian death drive. Capital’s disequilibrium
reappears on the level of its driving force of speculation. Perhaps it is the
same reason identified by the authors Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval as
“the new reason of the world”. Money acquires in Karatani’s reading of Marx
through Kant a quasi-religious status of the transcendental apperception of
human exchange. Unlike conventional economic theories including Marxian
theories, which often neglect money - for Marx and Karatani who follows him
in this argument – money as the general equivalent organizes the system of
commodities; it is the unifying point of the whole process of capital or the
overseer of fetishized social synthesis. Hence the money form of capital never
ages – the most recent excesses of finance capital and the disclosure of its
intimate alliance with national and supranational ruling bodies recalls the
‘amalgamation of absolutist monarchy and mercantilism’, with merchant
capital at its core. Karatani refers to this composite as the “archi-form of
capitalism” or the trinity Capital-Nation-State. The entire capitalist apparatus
was in place prior to industrial capital, as Karatani notes – “industrial capital
simply adapted this apparatus to its own needs.” (Architecture as Metaphor,
ibid., p. 172)

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Although the classical political economic doctrines of Smith and Ricardo

underpinning liberalism and industrial capitalism were formed as a rejection
of mercantilism – advanced capitalism has the ability to ceaselessly revive its
characteristic mechanisms/apparatuses – whether industrial or finance
capital all are swept up in the ever-expanding vortex of indefinitely deferred
payment. Braudel in his epic studies of capitalism indeed refers to capitalism
proper as the high rarefied tier of the “anti-market” existent at least since the
Renaissance – as opposed to the broader middle levels of a seemingly
transparent market economy or the largest quasi eternal ground level of
subsistence and ‘material life’ – the sphere of the ‘oikos’. Today though one
might say that Braudel’s resistant topology of ‘material life’ has also been
colonized in the form of ‘biopolitics’.
‘True’ capitalism he calls a parasitic form, which could not exist without the
ordinary economies: “In this confrontation between model and observation, I
found myself constantly faced with a regular contrast between a normal and
often routine exchange economy (what the eighteenth century would have
called the natural economy) and a superior, sophisticated economy (which
would have been called artificial). I am convinced that this distinction is
tangible, that the agents and men involved, the actions and mentalities, are
not the same in these different spheres; and that the rules of the market
economy regarding, for instance, free competition as described in classical
economics, although visible at some levels, operated far less frequently in the
upper sphere, which is that of calculation and speculation. At this level, one
enters a shadowy zone, a twilight area of activities by the initiated which I
believe to lie at the very root of what is encompassed by the term capitalism:
the latter being an accumulation of power (one that bases exchange on the
balance of strength, as much as, or more than on the reciprocity of needs), a
form of social parasitism which, like so many other forms, may or may not be
inevitable.” (Fernand Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, London, 1986, p. 22)
The ‘shadowy zone of the great predators’, Braudel’s name for the heirs of the
négociant and merchant capitalist – overlaps or is twinned with the ‘deep
state’. Capitalism is in itself a hierarchical structure – not a homogenous body
of economic actions and transactions conforming to one universal market

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rationality. Yet none of its levels can elude capitalism’s constitutive

asymmetry nor its overarching drive of M-M’.

The expression familiar since the last world financial crisis of 2008 – of those
firms “too big to fail” like AIG (American International Group) and hundreds
of others who were subsidized by the US government – shows that intimate
symbiosis of state/political power and economic power beyond a mere market
rationality – against it in most cases. (the bailouts are a sort of privatized
nationalisation of the failing firms – AIG was at the time of the bailout 80%
government owned.)
In the last century fascism and Nazism were extreme cases of a shadowy anti-
market economy capitalism.

Karatani’s transcritical view of Marx and Capital is of special interest for the
Turkish discussion of neoliberalism and global capitalism – his critique is at
least twofold: global and local – turned toward the West, modernity and
capitalism on a world scale – and at the same time sharply attuned to the local
“enclosure” of Japan. Similarly Turkey (like Japan a ‘latecomer’ to industrial
capitalism) is necessarily both in the West and outside of it (like Lord Byron,
among them but not of them) – to perceive its own modernity/capitalism it
must regard itself critically both locally and within the world context.

Themes of the Conference

“Capitalism, I believe, is nothing like the economic infrastructure. It is a

certain force that regulates humanity beyond its intentionality, a force that
divides and recombines human beings. It is a religio-generic entity. This is
what Marx sought to decode for the whole of his life.” (Karatani,
Transcritique)

From the wealth of ideas and insights contained in Karatani’s works –

Transcritique On Kant and Marx and Architecture as Metaphor, the

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conference proposes engaging with the following main areas of research for
which it would seek original contributions:

1. Marx’s critique of political economy as a continuation/extension of his early

critique of religion – in the sense that the object of political economy – the
commodity economy – has itself a theological nature. As Benjamin said in an
unpublished fragment – Capitalism as Religion – “Capitalism developed
parasitically on Christianity in the West (…) in such a way, that in the end, its
history is essentially the history of its parasites, of capitalism.” (Walter
Benjamin, Fragment 74 Gesammelte Schriften, Bd VI, Frankfurt, 1991, p. 102)
Everyday is a holiday or a day of penance and exhausting worship of the cult
while debts or guilt pile up interminably. Credit is also faith. Or as Karatani
states succinctly: “Marx conducted a critique of state and capital as an
extension of the critique of religion.” (Transcritique)

2. Asymmetrical Topologies of Capitalism/Capital - from supranational neo-

mercantilist geopolitical space – to the intimate micropolitical psychoanalytic
space of the subject and his/her subjectivation

3. The State, Capital and Nation – the often hidden or submerged relation
between the capitalist economy and the state especially in the neoliberal
doctrines of the ‘market economy’ or ‘market society’ and its belief in an
equilibrated symmetrical capitalism. Marx’s ‘missing’ theory of the state, of
taxation. Here Foucault’s studies of “governmentality” are of particular
interest and new neoliberal forms of rationality/reason and their limits.
Similarly we would like to explore the question of ‘failed states’ and their
relation to capital – or the fragmentation of power, territory/space and capital
in the demise of states. As Karatani remarks: The crisis brings out the ‘state-
in-itself’ and ‘money-in-itself’.

4. New Definitions of Labour – Human Capital (Being your own brand and
brand manager). Indebted Man (Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted
Man). Neo-Worker Virtuosity, Performance, General Intellect (Paolo Virno, A
Grammar of the Multitude)

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5. Capitalism is a drive (Trieb) not an infrastructure – money, credit and debt

are its dominant/driving forces (not production). The critique of money,
credit and debt. Marx’s discovery of the money form and value form; the
undying riddle of use value and exchange value. Marx’s relation to classic
political economy – between Ricardo and Bailey. Symmetry (equality) and
Asymmetry (inequality) in Marx’s thinking of the value form.

6. Is Marx more indebted to Kant or to Hegel? Or Marx’s Hegelian versus his

Kantian roots. Comparison of Karatani’s Kantian reading of Marx’s theory of
the value form with the ‘neue Marx Lektüre’ and its Hegelian reading of the
same.

7. The concept of critique and transcritique – the ‘homelessness of philosophy’

8. Capitalism as the totality of the market and the anti-market. Capitalism

and its ‘Other (s)’.

9. Karatani’s reflections on general or formal theories of exchange, gift and

counter-gift, social mana (Levi-Strauss, Mauss, Bataille, Sohn-Rethel) in
relation to Marx’s Capital

10. Global and Local Case Studies in Asymmetrical Capitalism in the sense of
Marx and Karatani

Proposed Contributors

Keynote Speakers

Kojin Karatani, Tokyo: TBC

Pierre Dardot, Paris (co-author of La Nouvelle Raison du Monde): TBC
Christian Laval, Paris (co-author of La Nouvelle Raison du Monde): TBC

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Plenary Speakers

Ferda Keskin, Comparative Literature, Bilgi University: Neoliberalist New

Definitions of Labour as Human Capital examined through the writings of
Foucault, Marx (Theories of Surplus Value), Schumpeter and in particular
Gabriel Tarde’s notion of invention capital, material capital and seed capital

Ceren Özselçuk, Sociology, Bogaziçi University and

Yahya Madra, Economics, Bogaziçi University: Marx and Lacan

Abbas Vali, Sociology, Bogaziçi University: TBC

Fikret Adaman, Economics, Bogaziçi University: TBC

Serhat Kologlugil, Economics, Isik University: On Karatani, TBC

Yildiz Silier, Philosophy, Bogaziçi University: TBC

Johannes Fritsche, Philosophy, Bogaziçi University: TBC

Ozren Pupovac, Humanities/Western Languages and Literature, Bogaziçi

University: TBC

Shannee Marks: Solve et coagula - Marx’s Romantic Irony and his Critique of
the Theology/Alchemy of Money

© Shannee Marks, Pangbourne, January 2015