Don’t be told what you want / Don’t be told what you need

There’s no future, no future / No future for you

— God Save the Queen, Sex Pistols, 1977

The Metaphysics of Posthistoire

It belongs to the peculiarities of historiography that the latest epoch conceives of the earlier ones as transitory stages leading up to itself.¹ This ex-post teleology used to be framed as a normative development from lower to higher stages of universal history. Although the catastrophic events of the “short twentieth century” have irreversibly discredited moral speculations about the historical progress of humanity, the idea of teleology has persisted. The shift from Immanuel Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim² to Samuel Huntington’s posthistorical “The Clash of Civilizations?”³ has only stripped the earlier teleologies of their historical optimism. Today, the Western model of capitalism posits itself as the best of all possible worlds; a natural outcome and endpoint of all historical development. From this perspective, all other histories necessarily appear as detours, diversions, or delays on the way to the latest stage of capitalist modernity. Although the rise of capitalism with “Asian values”⁴  has challenged the view that the West is capitalist modernity’s highest stage and privileged place, the basic idea of a linear normative development remains unquestioned as a sort of unchangeable law. If capitalist modernity defines the only model of social and political development, the very distinction between capitalism and modernization becomes tautological. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher aptly called this view “capitalist realism”—the tautological identity of what capitalism pretends to be and what its modern history actually is. If in the age of capitalist realism, capitalism “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable,”⁵ history shrinks to the size of the (pre)history of the capitalist present. According to this ideology, capitalism is the process of becoming the “best of all worlds”—a teleological and self-sustaining movement that defines the horizon of the collective imaginary.

The “post-ideological” teleology of today’s capitalism finds one of its most striking examples in the formula of so-called “catch-up” or “belated modernization.”⁶ Its basic dogma holds that the Western version of capitalism presents the highest standard of capitalist modernization for which “less developed” countries and regions still have to strive. The economic, political, and social modes of catching-up might differ from the historical “stages” of Western capitalism; however, the global goal is still clearly set. By failing to actually catch up with the West (that is, by failing to copy its historical “stages”), so-called less developed countries or regions seem to prove the superiority of the Western model of capitalist modernization. Consequently, those who “fail” join the ranks of “failed states”; while those who “succeed” become farcical clones of what is imagined to be modern in the Western capitalist sense; and, finally, those who fit the resource interests of global capital (fossil energy and rare raw materials) are kept alive as authoritarian client states, torn between external imperialist exploitation and internal “terrorism.” In the normative optics of capitalist teleology, any sort of political conflict or class antagonism disappears: infantilized latecomers either turn into reliable “partners” or remain economically exploited yet depoliticized beneficiaries of Western humanitarianism. As we know today, the latter comes in different shapes: military intervention (from “peacekeeping” to “peacemaking”), NGO missions to (re)build ideological state apparatuses, or imposed economic-financial reforms. Since none of these depoliticizing strategies attempt to overcome or even address class antagonism, the humanitarian crisis becomes permanent. The benevolent agent of the classic humanitarian intervention is, of course, the West. In this way, the Western model of capitalist modernization posits itself as the teleological norm vis-à-vis other formations of capitalism. 

This teleological norm, however, is no longer conceived in historical terms. Whereas earlier worldviews of Christian eschatology, moral teleology, and socio-scientific progress relied on the idea that there is such a thing as history, since 1989 Francis Fukuyama’s para-Hegelian thesis of an “end of history” has become an integral part of the capitalist imaginary. Accomplishing the historical working-through of world-spirit’s earlier stages, capitalist world history reveals itself as the dehistoricized world-market: history—“in-and-for-itself”—has arrived at a global posthistorical equilibrium, disturbed only by seemingly external frictions, tensions, and conflicts, which appear as manageable, at least in principle. However, with the capitalist-realist mode of spatialized teleology the very concept of history becomes ahistorical—history is turned into a historicized epoch, a disposable commodity disconnected from the present.⁷

As a result, the capitalist-realist fantasy of a self-regulating world market bound to perfection, self-improvement, and ecological sustainability is able to operate without a historical horizon. One could argue that theory has already reacted to this condition. The return of pre-modern cosmologies under the watchwords of “object-oriented ontology” or “new materialism” can be read as symptoms of the deflation of the historical imaginary. At the same time, the accelerationist conjuration and reconsideration of large-scale projects of social-democratic modernism make a counter-move to regain a historical imaginary. However we side in these current debates, it seems that in the space of capitalist realism we have to choose between either fetishizing the past (this is the terrain of the culture industry of commemoration: the production of memory without history) or abandoning the battlefield of history altogether to engage in more cosmological questions about the impact of an abstract humankind on the planet and the universe (the discourse on the “anthropocene” might be the paradigmatic case). But there is, as I believe, a third option, to reenter the battlefield of history following the theoretical marks left by Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx. 

The Spatialization of History

World capitalism in its “age” after the end of history has not abolished the idea of teleological progress, it has only changed its staging ground: progress is translated into space. Time is stripped of its historical dimension and reduced to a sequential marker of dehistoricized space. To be sure, the seemingly eternal presence of the world market knows different local temporalities; but these temporalities are always already mapped in spatial terms. The rise of “area studies” as a major academic discipline (which substitutes the historical science of sociology) is symptomatic of this conjuncture. If, as the literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson stated in the 1990s, the postmodern mode of spatialization is driven by “the will to use and to subject time to the service of space,”⁸ today we realize that this postmodern will has created a world after its own image. But what happens to the concept of space once it has lost its historical stratification? It seems that the continuum of space and spatialized time has no “outside.” The capitalist posthistoire knows no history, only the prehistory of its own contemporaneous space.

This conjuncture seems paradoxical only at first sight: while history is being museumized, the seemingly outdated modern concepts of progress, development, and evolution are still in place. The best example is, again, provided by the concept of “catch-up modernization.” Since modernization is no longer bound to historical teleologies, postmodern modernization is measured by the accessibility of space(s) to global capital investment, production, and reproduction. Once space is mapped, measured, and defined as a specific place, it can be evaluated, ranked, and valorized by global capital. The results of this development range from neocolonial land grabs and legalized expropriations to the dynamic of gentrification in global cities. Moreover, this development has become the benchmark of development altogether. Capital simply asks: how does a certain place perform within the global space of the capitalist world market? It is a perspective from which any form of political and social resistance appears as an impediment to “development.” 

In the global space of capitalism, counter-historical struggles of the wretched of the earth⁹ or built from the “tradition of the oppressed”¹⁰ are fought as battles of local places against global space. However, not every form of anti-capitalist resistance is emancipatory. It all hinges on the political capacity to translate local struggles into a universal struggle that cannot be mapped by capital. This work of translation is political, social, economic, and linguistic. It cannot rely on an abstract universalism or generalized formulas but has to invent its own emancipatory language out of the fragments of “commodity-language” (Marx) and its universal form, money. In other words, the political struggle of the present has to revisit the battleground of universalism in order to formulate a universal, yet local strategy of de-spatialization as de-commodification. The problem, however, remains: how can struggles for collective (counter)history escape their reintegration into the spatialized logic of capital? 

It is under the conditions of the spatialization of time and the dehistoricization of space that the unhistoricizable and, in this sense, repressed origin of capitalism returns. The violent integration and reintegration of places into the space of the capitalist world market is nothing else than a spatialized term for what Marx called ursprüngliche Akkumulation (original accumulation), the eternal recurrence of capitalism’s primal scene (Urszene).¹¹ This origin, in German, Ursprung, which literally means “primal-leap,” has to be repeated always anew in order to keep capitalism alive. Here, repetition is spatial, the displacement of the origin from one place to another. Hence, “original accumulation,” the violent separation of labor power from the means of production that allows for the extraction of “abstract labor” and “surplus value,” does not designate a primitive stage of capitalism that took place “once upon a time” but the non-historicizable origin and starting point of each stage of capitalist accumulation. It is true that this specifically capitalist separation took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and one could read the German Peasants’ War (1524–25) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) as the initial phase establishing capitalism in Europe. Capitalism’s original accumulation, however, is not at some safe historical distance. It is repeated in the dehistoricized space of the present. Repetition here is to be read as original and self-differentiating¹²—as affirmation and reconditioning of current forms of “time, labor and social domination.”¹³ Today, we live in a capitalist world in which almost all of its earlier historical stages coexist next to each other: uneven temporalities are rendered as uneven space. While the sites of slavery, so-called “Manchester capitalism,” and capitalized modes of feudalism are constantly restaged in segregated areas, the postmaterial fantasists of a green capitalism with “Google democracy” engage in debates on so-called immaterial labor. Under these conditions, the prefix of notions like neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism has lost its historical significance: capitalism’s pre-, neo-, and post- coexist in space. In a non-polemical sense, in the dehistoricized space of capitalism’s “history” is reduced to the functioning of a 3D printer: the fantasy of (re)producing history in space becomes real.¹⁴

The Messianicity of Historical Time

Benjamin’s concept of historical time provides a counter model to salvage the remnants of modernity’s concept of history without repeating its postmodern deadlock. His messianic version of historical materialism addressed the most crucial points of Marx’s critique: (1) the historicization of capitalism as a socially and historically specific, yet ultimately contingent mode of production; and (2) the conceptualization of capitalist history as a process of dynamic social forces and the struggles they produce, irreducibly related to a dimension of radical difference (communism, classless society). In the context of so-called “Western Marxism,” Benjamin’s intervention conceived of history as an anachronic constellation of fragments of time, enacted and lost in class struggle. Criticizing both the social-democratic belief in historical progress and the historicist fantasy of an approximative access to history, Benjamin lays bare the structure of historical time. Historical time is not linear, stable, or continuous because history is not a progression in “homogeneous, empty time.”¹⁵ Rather, history is incomplete in a radical sense: its texture is woven of struggles, catastrophes, and failures. Therefore, it can never be self-sufficient or identical with itself. For Benjamin—in contrast to a traditional Kantian understanding—time is not a transcendental form of contingent empirical events but is itself a contingent, heterogeneous, and discontinuous medium. Time as historical time is porous, insufficient, and non-identical—it is related to something other than itself. 

This differential relation, however, is not conceived in a teleological or utopian way. Without giving up on the idea of a radical caesura, Benjamin deteleologized Marxism and opened it to a heterogeneous dimension of historical time produced and, at the same time, repressed by capitalist modernity. His Marxian question was: how to relate the political presence of class struggle to a truly historical experience without relying on an idealist-utopian, normative, or metahistorical perspective? 

If the experience of history is historical only if it is related to something (or, rather, some-time) radically “other” than itself, this “otherness” is neither derived from a golden past nor from a utopian future. In other words, this “otherness” is internal. Historical experience is an experience in and of the present—an experience of the non-identical temporality that renders the present open to change. Every disjointed “now” can be the opening to another present. “For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.”¹⁶ However, if no “now” is identical with itself (which is the meaning of transience or ephemerality), there can be no objective prediction of change and, therefore, no measurement of historical experience. For the medium in which such an experience could be transmitted and imparted is itself “made” of historical time. And historical time is, as we said before, porous, insufficient, non-identical. It is in this sense that the medium of historical experience is fractured and partakes in the political struggles of the present. Moreover, it is only this medium through which the present is rendered as non-identical and open to change. However, the fractured medium of historical experience and its “material” (that is, historical time) does not offer any guarantees: is it permanent or transient, actual or potential, present or absent, positive or negative?¹⁷ Acknowledging this undecidability, Benjamin nevertheless states: “The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand [einsteht] and has come to a standstill.”¹⁸ Understood in this materialist way, the term “messianic” refers to two semantic fields: (1) the attention to and anticipation of this standstill of time through which another present could become real; (2) the medium of this change (historical time) and the experience imparted by this medium (historical experience). Nevertheless, and despite its religiously, theologically, and ethically overdetermined genealogy, the signifier of the messianic does not acquire a positive meaning. In today’s present it only marks the empty spot through which a hidden, repressed past can become actual. Without these “messianic” gaps the present would be fully totalizable, leaving no temporal cracks for a different present yet to come. It is precisely this privative, negative, and inconsistent moment (which Benjamin calls messianic) that the spatialization of history seeks to homogenize. In the continuous universe of flat space there are no constitutive gaps, only terra incognita waiting to be discovered, evaluated, and valorized. Once history is historicized, outsourced in the space of museums, libraries, and hard-drives, the posthistorical space of capitalism appears without alternative—it literally becomes the one, uni, versality of all forms of life. Hence, for the dispossessed and exploited the only way to change their situation within capitalism remains spatial: forced migration, becoming a refugee, the posthistorical “homo sacer.”¹⁹

The capitalist-realist fantasy of the present thrives on the idea that space is ultimately manageable or, at least, containable. From this perspective, the dehistoricization of time and the spatialization of history become legible as strategies for sealing off the space of capital against attempts to break open its borders. It is very telling that the ongoing political-economic crisis of global capitalist space appears as a battle around borders. Global power translates into the power to control the zones of exploitation of raw materials, the circulation of commodities, and the movement of human beings. Resource wars, trade wars, and so-called “refugee crises” are mobile, yet permanent battle grounds of spatial governmentality. These struggles in and for space seem to have lost their specific historical significance: co-presence in segregated spaces replaces historical-temporal sequentiality. Space in its very transitoriness and ephemerality becomes eternal. The contested space of capitalism, however, is also the place of resistance. Here, we reenter the unmappable terrain of history and Benjamin’s materialist concept of historical time. 

It sounds paradoxical: from a historical perspective, the past is still ahead of us. The task is not to rewrite the past from the perspective of the present but to destabilize the seemingly solid ground of the present through the past. In sharp contrast to historicism, it is the past that historicizes and thereby “relativizes” our present.”²⁰ If the past is not a fait accompli, it keeps on putting the present to the test. The present is not anymore conceived as absolute and necessary but relativized as changeable and contingent. It is in this sense that history is ontologically incomplete: as long as the potentialities of the past are repressed and reduced to their actualized outcome, the past cannot be fully historicized. History is historical for it lacks the messianic redemption and completion of its past failures and non-events. And it is only this structural lack that makes history historical and allows for a historical experience of and in the present. 

But with postmodernism and the rise of what Jameson called the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” the experience of such a lack has disappeared. Maybe the punks of the mid 1970s were the last ones who had consciousness of this disappearance. Having “no future,”²¹ acknowledging the deadlock of historical experience, is not simply being “without future.” Far from being postmodern, “no future” is the watchword of the anti-utopian historical consciousness of the present,²² the ultimate gesture of affirming the lack of historical completeness. Today, however, we lack even this lack—we do not have “no future” but only a dehistoricized, petrified present formed by unrelated singular now-points in space. But what does a space without “no future” experience? What is the aesthetics of capitalist spatialization?

The Aesthetics of Singularity

It is not by chance that Jameson later revisited his earlier thesis on the spatialization of history as the main feature of postmodernity. In fact, spatialization is not only a capitalist strategy or an abstraction from historical time; it has also an aesthetical counterpart. Focusing on “phenomena equally spatial, equally ephemeral,” Jameson speaks of a “postmodern artistic singularity-effect,” rendering art as singularity, as an unrelated, self-identical present without future or past.²³ The ephemeral aesthetics of art installations provides the most obvious case study to prove Jameson’s observation. “The material support of the installation medium is the space itself,”²⁴ as Boris Groys rightly notes. Turning space into its material, the “art installation is not site-specific, and it can be installed in any place and for any time.”²⁵ In this way, space and time are rendered as singular; installations seek to offer the experience of aura, the “here and now” of a work of art that Benjamin famously defined as non-reproducible.²⁶ 

Jameson’s main argument, however, is that the postmodern singularity effect is not limited to art or the art market but concerns the entire realm of the aesthetic and its forms of perception, intuition, and experience. Paralleling tendencies in the fields of financial capitalism, postmodern politics, and postmodern art, Jameson shows how one-off events, which do not seek institutionalization, endurance, or reproducibility, create a generalizable singularity-effect bound to dehistoricized space. Indeed, one could argue that under the capitalist conditions of short-term financialization and long-term structural debt, the control over space seems to be a more successful strategy for capital accumulation than relying on the temporalized regulation of surplus labor extraction and investing in the reproduction of labor power. If capital’s fetishistic fantasy of “money which begets money”²⁷ is always endangered by crises and risks of future devaluation, it is only the spatialization of temporal risks and bonds that offers an instant staging ground for the wealth of postmodern nations. The obvious site of capitalist spatialization is real estate speculation, which in turn leads to housing crises, gentrification, and the enforced displacement of entire groups of pauperized inhabitants of global cities and regions. These graphic effects, however, obfuscate the asymmetric nexus of speculative space and speculative capital. If capital is not merely a fiction but also the really existing abstraction of concrete labor time, space too as speculative space is both abstract and real. Consequently, from the perspective of capital owners, it is consistent to treat real space as a speculative abstract resource. Since capital is always credit-based, speculative space appears as a “safe” option to keep the temporal risks of growing debts and infinite indebtedness within an assessable spatial scope. In this way, speculative space becomes another expression of what Marx called the “fetishism of capital,” the seemingly automatic self-valorization of economic value. This fetish does not spare those who are at the receiving end of speculative space. Capital remains intangible once struggles for land, public spaces, and affordable housing limit their interventions to reclaiming space(s). Ultimately, capital is indifferent to particular places, it only relies on the guaranteed convertibility of speculative time (that is, credit-based capital and the infinite temporality of debt repayment) into speculative space—a space that bears no traces of its repressed origin, the exploitation of labor power.

It comes as no surprise that the aesthetics of capitalist spatialization, its “clean” surfaces and “smart” interfaces, give shape to the fantasy of speculative capital as self-generative. The slick architecture of financialization, which dovetails with the immaterial imaginary of digital online transactions and traceless valorization processes, contributes to a petrified aesthetics of historical-temporal repression. It represses the fact that the monuments of capital and speculative space are metamorphoses of the extraction of living labor, turned into really existing abstractions.

Jameson’s observation that “in our time all politics is about real estate”²⁸ is indicative. The dynamic of financialization takes the fetish of capital, that is, the really existing fantasy of money-begetting-money, to its next level. Whereas for Marx only money and commodity can function as capital’s form of appearance, now space itself, always already commodified, turns into the material shell of capital. In this way, the “neo”-feudal emphasis on land grabs in the context of the general “preponderance of space over time in late capitalism”²⁹ becomes legible as the dialectical pole of its opposite: the prevalence of time over concrete space, that is, historically and socially situated places. The rise of seemingly fluid immaterial labor in the age of digital reproducibility, also known as the “third industrial revolution,” led to the illusion that capitalist wage labor could be a clean, fluid, spatially mobile resource of the sphere of circulation without the dirty contradictions of the sphere of production, that is, class antagonism, strikes, and original accumulation.³⁰ This conjuncture reveals the dialectics of spatialization: space is not merely an abstract term for place or locality but also a denaturalized, abstract term for time. If financial capitalism and its inherent digital technologies flatten time to spatial co-presence, separated only by minimal temporal delays and asynchronies (caused by the physical limit of fiber optics’ speed of light), space itself becomes the marker of time—a singular time, identical only with itself, that is, identical with its place in a global ahistorical continuum of capital-space. And vice versa, if “singularity is a pure present without a past or a future,”³¹ this ahistorical temporality can only be mapped by spatial coordinates of singular, unrelated now-points of time. Of course, such a definition of singularity seems tautological.³² 

The Ontology of Capital Time

The semblance of tautology disappears only once we remind ourselves of the asymmetric relation that time, capital, and labor have in capitalism. According to Marx, capital can only be produced through the extraction of surplus labor. The economic value that labor power produces in a certain timespan is worth more than the reproductive costs of labor. However, it is not possible to determine the exact amount of spatialized labor time that capital exploits as surplus value—a surplus value that valorizes itself through reinvestment as a seemingly self-propelled force, driven by capital itself.³³ The fetish of capital as automatic subject and autopoietic system also affects the concept of time and its functioning as a seemingly neutral measure of labor power expenditure. Already Marx stated that it is only the “economy of time” to which “all economy ultimately reduces itself.”³⁴ And it is this specific economy of time that reduces time to an abstract, empty form of commodified space. In capitalism, however, the dialectic of time and space is uneven, asymmetric, and ultimately stretched into infinity. In other words, in credit-based, and therefore debt-driven economies’, space is not simply another extension of time besides the present, past, and future. If present profit has its future origin in the extraction of an abstract “amount” of labor time,³⁵ the retroactive time of capital is speculative by definition. Capital bets on the future to which it is infinitely, that is, irredeemably indebted. Given the abstract—and in this sense incalculable—“amount” of future labor time that is valorized in today’s financial capitalism, the time of the future is not anymore “our” future (depending on who is “we” in this case). Rather, the future of capital time already owns us and we are indebted to a future without history. The financialization of capitalism presents the last, most radical stage of this basic dynamic. There is no future redemption in the economy of debt, only the compromised promise to remain “credible”—to believe in the “credo of capital.”³⁶ 

Under these conditions, time is not a neutral measure of spatial difference like chronometric time, but a speculative resource that temporalizes itself through the valorization of labor power. Such a self-temporalization of capital time never arrives at historical time: its totalizing ontology leaves no indeterminate empty spots, no undefinable gaps of time which could turn into messianic openings of a different non-capitalist time. Deprived of a historical medium, the self-temporalization of capital presses for the instant spatialization of its real-abstract substance and unconscious driving force: abstract labor time, be it extracted as concrete labor time in the past or speculated on as future speculative time. What Jameson calls the singularity effect is nothing else than the aesthetic sublation of this asymmetric nexus that time and space acquire in capitalism. In a way one could argue that he gives a further twist to a dynamic that “Western Marxism” since Georg Lukács already theorized as Verdinglichung, “reification.”³⁷ With Jameson we can now add that capitalist reification is never limited to res, Dinge, things; rather, space itself becomes the denaturalized expression of commodified social relations. Put differently, what Jameson calls the aesthetics of singularity presents the aesthetic, that is, experiential counterpart of a seemingly intangible, abstract social relation—the commodity form—and its inherent dialectics of time and space. As the first chapters of Marx’s Capital demonstrate, there is no illustrative, empirical, or concrete way to represent the dialectics of the commodity form in terms of everyday consciousness. The same holds true for the self-temporalization of capital time. What appears as dehistoricized space, as an aesthetics of singularity, exceeds “at the same time” the realm of sensual experience. For the commodity is a “sensuous-supra-sensuous thing.”³⁸ 

If historical time, according to Benjamin, is only historical in the strict sense if it is open, incomplete, fissured by lack (the lack of messianic redemption), the current form of highly financialized capitalism is without history, that is without “no future.” The seemingly tautological convertibility of time into space and space into time has overturned the specifically temporal perspective of historical continuity, linearity, and rupture. What is left is the dehistoricized present of multiple co-presences, contemporaneous space.³⁹ Quite ironically it is not that this present has “no future” but, rather, the already capitalized future has emancipated itself from the present. The future to which we are infinitely indebted has colonized the dehistoricized space of the present. Spatialization is the aesthetic form of appearance of this historical deadlock. The pseudo-messianic perspective of a fulfilled teleology of capital time has created a world after its own image: a commodified space without history and without “no future.” 

Modus Moriendi

Despite this totalizing trajectory, the capitalist view of the world is not eternal but doomed to fail. Global financial capitalism and its inherent digital technologies cannot succeed in fully flattening time to ahistorical, self-identical co-presences. The future to which this present is indebted is not a real future. The future of current capitalism is a paradoxical future past. While future labor time is already valorized in today’s spatialized co-presences, the unfolding crises of future de-valorizations have already consumed every singular “here and now” of capital time. What enters the economic conscious only in the guise of manageable “toxic assets” or “toxic debt” is actually an intoxicated time: a phantasmagorical or spectral time that has been consumed in space before it was lived. From the perspective of capital, the seemingly tautological convertibility of time and space slides into what Hegel called “bad quantitative infinity.”⁴⁰ Capital is both infinitely too slow and infinitely too fast to keep pace with its spatial mode of temporalization. Zeno’s paradox of “Achilles and the Tortoise” seems to be transposed to Kant’s transcendental forms of time and space. They never fully catch up. 

The paradoxical loophole in the ontology of capital time and capital space is both systemic failure and driving force. However, if every singular “here and now” of capital time has already been employed and consumed—that is, spatialized—before it is brought into being, the manic hyperactivity of “catch-up” is futile. The future of current real-time capitalism, the future of its social relations, analogue surfaces, and digital interfaces is already in the past—consumed, devalorized, annulled by a future past that will never arrive in the present. This temporal loophole reintroduces history in the time of capital. As Benjamin already stated in the mid-1930s: “With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”⁴¹ The monuments of current capitalism, its architectural, financial, and ecological wastelands are already ruins, a facies hippocratica on speed. The modus vivendi of capitalist spatialization reveals itself as the modus moriendi of capitalism’s future past. The time of dying, however, takes time. 

This text was originally published in Maria Hlavajova/Simon Sheikh (eds.), Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, Cambridge/Utrecht: MIT Press, 2016, 639–52. It appears again here in Umbau by kind permission of the editors.

Footnotes

1. This essay is a work in progress. I am grateful to Boris Buden for his patient and insightful comments during the editing process. The essay is a further elaboration on themes I have discussed elsewhere, particularly in the articles “The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time: Marx with Benjamin,” in Studies in Social and Political Thought, vol. 20, Winter 2012/13, pp. 46–69, and “This is the Reproducibility of Singular Time,” in This is the Time. This is The Record of the Time, Angela Harutyunyan and Nat Muller, eds. (Beirut: AUB Press, 2016), pp. 40–49. ↑

2. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 107–120. ↑

3. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 22–49. ↑

4. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), p. 179; See also “Interview with Slavoj Žižek – full transcript,” New Statesman, 29 October 2009, online at: http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/10/today-interview-capitalism. ↑

5. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009), p. 9. ↑

6. According to the classical sociological discourse, modernization designates a specific process of social, political, and economic transformation starting in the eighteenth century. This process is characterized by “pioneering” and “latecomer” societies. See Reinhard Bendix: “Modernisierung in internationaler Perspektive,” Theorien sozialen Wandels, ed. Wolfgang Zapf (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1969_, pp. 505–512. The theory of latecomer societies and belated modernization was taken up after 1990 and critically rephrased in Jürgen Habermas’ article “Nachholende Revolution und linker Revisionsbedarf. Was heißt Sozialismus heute?” (“What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left”), first published in Jürgen Habermas, Die nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), pp. 179–204. ↑

7. This disconnection is echoed and compensated by the present’s “retromanic” attachment to previous historical epochs, especially in the field of pop culture. In light of today’s dehistoricized retro-fashion, the music journalist Simon Reynolds notes: “This kind of retromania has become a dominant force in our culture, to the point where it feels like we’ve reached some kind of tipping point. Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times? But what happens when we run out of past?” Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 9.) ↑

8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), p. 153. ↑

9. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004). ↑

10. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), p. 392. ↑

11. In chapter 24 of Das Kapital, vol. 1, Marx discusses “Die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation” (“The so-called original accumulation”). Marx’s translation of the English term “primitive accumulation”—a common term of the political economy of his time—is not accidental. Marx does not only distance himself from the classical political-economic tradition by adding “sogenannte” (“so-called”); moreover, he introduces a term that undermines the historical imaginary of an evolutionary or linear development proceeding from primitive to civilized stages. Choosing the adjective “ursprünglich” (“original”) Marx suggests a different reading that alludes to uneven development and non-linear, recurring temporalities (Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, vol. 1, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED. Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 23 (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), pp. 741–791). It is very telling that Marx, with cutting irony, invokes a theological “primal scene” when referring to the classical political-economic notion of ursprüngliche Akkumulation: “This primitive (“ursprüngliche”) accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past.” (Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 873). For a further discussion of the recursive structure of Marx’s term “ursprüngliche Akkumulation” see Rosalind C. Morris, “Ursprüngliche Akkumulation: The Secret of an Originary Mistranslation,” boundary 2, no. 43: 3 (August 2016), pp. 29–77. ↑

12. The formulation of differentiating repetition is inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same.” In short, Deleuze argues that the eternal moment of the “eternal return” is not that which returns but the repetition of the return itself: “The eternal return is not the permanence of the same, the equilibrium state or the resting place of the identical. It is not the ‘same’ or the ‘one’ which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs” (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), p. 46). Against the intention of the author, I take Deleuze’s understanding of difference in repetition or differentiating repetition as a possible formula of what Marx calls “capital,” the self-valorization of value (i.e., “abstract labor”). ↑

13. See Moishe Postone Time, Labor and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univ. Press 1993) ↑

14. The idea of reproducing lost historical objects and artefacts with the help of 3D-printers has lost its geek appeal. In the case of the destruction of the ancient ruins of the Syrian city of Palmyra, carried out by Daesh terror gangs in 2015, the possibility of digital 3D reproductions of the destroyed ruins has been publicly discussed. What at first sight seems accidental in the case of historical objects, I read as symptomatic of what I call the spatialization of history altogether. ↑

15. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” p. 395. ↑

16. Ibid., p. 397. ↑

17. In terms of historical time and the medium of historical experience, in his notes of The Arcades Project Benjamin introduces his theory of historical and “dialectical images.” “Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic images. The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recognisability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.” (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 463, Convolute N3, 1). Also in the theses “On the Concept of History” Benjamin notes: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.” (Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” p. 390). Fleeting historical images provide the fragmentary medium of authentic historical experience. This medium is in fact “made” of non-linear time. Already in his earliest notes on The Arcades he stated that in the dialectical image “lies time”; however, “real time enters the dialectical image not in natural magnitude—let alone psychologically—but in its smallest gestalt.” (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 867, Convolute Q° 21). ↑

18. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” p. 396. ↑

19. This term relates to Giorgio Agamben’s study Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). ↑

20. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute—or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London; New York: Verso, 2000), p. 90. ↑

21. Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen,” 1977. ↑

22. A late echo of punk’s gesture can be found in T. J. Clark’s anti-utopian plea “For a Left With No Future”: “There will be no future, I am saying finally, without war, poverty, Malthusian panic, tyranny, cruelty, classes, dead time, and all the ills the flesh is heir to, because there will be no future; only a present in which the left (always embattled and marginalized, always—proudly—a thing of the past) struggles to assemble the ‘material for a society’ Nietzsche thought had vanished from the earth. And this is a recipe for politics, not quietism—a left that can look the world in the face” (in New Left Review, no. 74 (March/April 2012), p. 75). ↑

23. Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review, no. 92 (March/April 2015), p. 110, 122. ↑

24. Boris Groys, “Politics of Installation,” e-flux journal, no. 2 (January 2009), p. 3. ↑

25. Ibid., p. 4. ↑

26. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 2nd version, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), pp. 21–22. ↑

27. Marx, Capital, vol.1, p. 256. ↑

28. Jameson, “Aesthetics of Singularity,” p. 130. ↑

29. Ibid. ↑

30. Contrary to the discourse on “immaterial labor,” we live in an age in which the industrial working force is still growing. This development is most clearly visible in the case of China. ↑

31. Jameson, “Aesthetics of Singularity,” p. 113. ↑

32. Jameson, however, suggests a post-conceptual solution to this impasse: “Singularity, in other words, proposes something unique which resists the general and the universalizing (let alone the totalizing); in that sense, the concept of singularity is itself a singular one, for it can have no general content, and is merely a designation for what resists all subsumption under abstract or universal categories” (Ibid., p. 126). ↑

33. Marx’s technical term for labor as value-creating substance is not concrete or simple labor (which could be measured by time) but “abstract human labor”—a non-empirical, yet really existing social category, which is mediated by the totality of all spatial expenditures of labor power in a given society, See Marx, Capital, pp. 137–169. ↑

34. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973). ↑

35. I have elsewhere given a detailed account on this reading of Marx, see my article “The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time: Marx with Benjamin,” Studies in Social and Political Thought, Vol. 20 (Winter 2012/2013), pp. 46–69. ↑

36. Marx, Capital, p. 919. ↑

37. See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). ↑

38. Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1 p. 85. Translation by author. ↑

39. These co-presences are unrelated in terms of historical time. Their relationality is only achieved in spatial terms, as teleologically organized and hierarchized co-presences of the same global capitalist space. It is this space that is the staging ground of the posthistorical, yet teleological fantasy of “catch-up modernization.” ↑

40. “This infinity, which persists in the determination of the beyond of the finite, is to be characterized as the bad quantitative infinity. Like the qualitatively bad infinity, it is the perpetual movement back and forth from one side of the persistent contradiction to the other, from the limit to its non-being, and from the latter back again to the other, the limit. . . . Also the progress, therefore, is neither an advance nor a gain but rather a repetition of one and the same move, a positing, a sublating, and then again a positing and a sublating: an impotence of the negative to which what it sublates continuously comes back by its very sublation of it.” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. George di Giovanni, trans. George di Giovanni, The Cambridge Hegel Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), p. 192. ↑

41. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 13. ↑