Transcendental and Immanent Capital: An Economics of an Oncological Order

There is an inhering irony to Adam Smith's "invisible hand", how greedy self-interest for profit lends itself to the alleged collective good of material and economic exchange, the profit matrix of production-consumption-excretion of a model of capitalist economics that is patterned on a vertical transcendence, or what Hegel had called "civil society."

A second emergent irony arises when the drive to accumulate capital, brought to its absolute limit would render the value of the totality of capital as zero, and so it is only the relation of capital exchange that has real value.

As the mode of capital's expression has been changed due to the disintegration and redistribution of its power among the plenum, so too has its character of transcendent verticality changed into that of an immanent horizon where all capital functions on a plane of immanence without striations, smoothing out what we now know to be a global economy. Our proposed method of analysis will be to give a cursory analysis of this exchange from transcendent verticality to immanent horizontality, to utilize the condition of cancer as a suitable metaphor to be mapped unto this new immanent mode of capital, and to consecutively propose an alternative to the falsely immanent character of capital and economic exchange. We do not claim here to give a full exposition of this rather complex transition from one mode to its successor, from the imperial to the global, but rather assume a certain complicity with this historical phenomena to assist in our giving full breadth to a newly minted theory of immanent economics that does not rely on the metastasis of the capital-economic order.

Although the historical transition between imperial Rome and Christian Rome entailed a dissolution or rearticulation of the imperial, the transcendence of the western order was not made immanent in the east, but rather replaced by a new transcendent order.

In the time of the Caesars, the emperor was an Emanation, or the Great Chain of Capital. In the time of the sovereign, all capital emanated from one singular despotic "origin" that disseminated its power like a web over subjects, in a model of verticality where the sovereign extends the credit and guarantee of capital to subjects who receive it as a kind of symbolic debt insofar as the use of this capital is in recognition of a kind of gift that in turn recognizes the sovereign who guarantees its value. And although this capital was guaranteed by the face of the individual emblazoned upon the obverse of a coin, the character of the indexical that provided this guarantee was little more than a role. That is, the symbolic order of Caligula was finite and would be succeeded by Claudius, and then Nero, and so forth. But what remained was the static transcendentalism of the vertical model of the order-institution of the emperor-or Godhead of despotic capital. The fiat character of monetary currency still had its origin in the guarantor, the emperor, and participation by subjects guaranteed the legitimacy of the sovereign as guarantor of all economic exchanges.

However, when Christ said "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's", this was a direct assault against the value of the sovereign as guarantor of economic exchange. Of course, in the short term, very few former participants in the Caesarian economy shared the view that the value of the emperor's guarantee of currency was illegitimate, and should be brought to bear on that which was more immanent. The result of this insurgency by Christ and his close associates failed in the short term: he was placed on the rood as a common insurgent. Despite this rather brusque death sentence, Christ's challenge against the transcendent verity of the empire had created something of an anxiety or a zone of rupture in the monolith of the imperial sovereign's image, exposing a crack wherein rushed a trickle of doubt. This doubt would intensify after Christ's crucifixion, and would signal the end of the transcendent signifying order of the emperor and the beginning of a nascent immanent order. However, Christ did not propose an immanent alternative, but rather re-assigned the transcendent origin to a "higher power" above that of Caesar: God. This displacement of origin and center to another transcendent order would not prove too difficult an obstacle for sovereignty to overcome, for as the emperors of Byzantium had done, they integrated the new transcendent order into their own, making themselves the conduit of this order by way of a genealogical succession; "God's ambassador on earth." Although the sovereign was not the absolute transcendental origin, he was the next best thing, and the only material representative of this power. It was by the command of God that the sovereign ruled and guaranteed economic exchange, as an extended legitimacy of his power. The relevance of this paradigm is necessary as an illustration of our more contemporary discussion of immanent capital as merely an exchange of transcendent orders, that in fact the immanent character of capital at its very base is nothing more than a newly reconstituted plane of transcendence. This is to say that the only change that has occurred is capital's method of deployment when its more theoretical underpinnings remain that of the transcendent.

The Urdoxa of transcendent capital has moved from material exchange to the virtualization of the number or the numeralization of the virtual as capital itself has been transformed from the transcendent to the immanent mode. The character of a transcendent capital order has lost its head. The crisis of modernity was the scene of the loss of origin. That is, the sovereign that stood in the place of the guarantor of all hard currency has been a monolith since dismantled, reproduced in portions, and eventually distributed along a series of chains and networks in the domains of labour and finance. And even a central governing body (governmentality replacing sovereignty or the monarchic) or financial organization does not operate alone, but rather functions in concert with a larger machinic apparatus of intermediaries put in place and instaurated by the demands and the promise of capital's limit. The interests of the "center" now overlap with that of the "periphery", and so the partitions of static sovereignty have all been dissolved or leveled, and any imposed organizational partition succumbs to frame leakage as the machinic and onco-ontological character of capital seeps and appropriates new milieus. What Deleuze identifies as the "transcendence of the despotic signifier...its consecutive decomposition into minimal elements within a field of immanence uncovered by the withdrawl of the despot"(AO 240) is manifest in the continued dissolution of primitive accumulation among more traditional nation-based economies on the periphery of an ever-englobing capitalist regime.

One of the allegedly clear signs of a global monetary system and how capital demonstrates its immanent character is the rise of the Internet as mediation and mediatization of money. As a communicative global nexus, it has served as a tool for the freer flow of capital across borders. Capital is literally "screened" or mediated through the Internet, creating a system of double-fiat: the fiat of currency itself now filtered through the fiat of the numerical order as bits of transferred data streaming across fiber optic lines. Money is now "virtual" in the sense that its code can be transferred without recourse to its materiality. In fact, it is perhaps possible to live without ever setting hands upon any hard currency whatsoever. This new "soft" currency portrays the very virtualization and numeralization of the monetary order, but before any claim of immanence can be assigned to this mode of exchange, it should be reminded that it is still anchored to real, hard currency. Deleuze defines capital as "the deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction."^¹ Capital's tendency is toward concretization: "the abstraction has not ceased to be what it is, but it no longer appears in the simple quantity as a variable relation between independent terms."^² Capital absorbs this function and assigns the quality of terms and the quantity of their relations. Capital "operates on the plane of immanence, through relays and networks of relationships of domination, without reliance on a transcendent center of power."^³ Following from this, the "general equivalence of money brings all elements together in quantifiable, commensurable relations, and then the immanent laws or equations of capital determine their deployment and relation according to the particular constants that are substituted for the variables of the equations."^⁴ And so "money represents a potential break-deduction in a flow of consumption" and "a break-detachment and a rearticulation of economic chains directed toward the adaptation of flows of production to the disjunctions of capital."^⁵ One of the chief principles of a mutational capitalism is its ability to appropriate production, for in fact "capitalism doesn't begin, the capitalist machine is not assembled until capital directly appropriates production, and until financial capital and merchant capital are no longer anything but specific functions corresponding to a division of labour in the capitalist mode of production in general."^⁶ By appropriating all production within its immanent encasement, "capital becomes the full body, the new socius or the quasi-cause that appropriates all the productive forces."^⁷ Capitalism is reactive, limiting what active forces can do through a process of subversion and co-opting of the codes and flows of economic exchange outside its own domain.

An example of how the virtualization of the monetary order, or the "demonetization of the monetary" is the relay system of debt and credit: "bank credit effects a demonetization or dematerialization of money, and is based on the circulation of drafts instead of the circulation of money...[T]he dualism of these two forms of money, payment and financing-the two aspects of banking practice."^⁸ Append to this dualism the added technical feature of the "Internetization" of money, and one may trace the continued immanent fluidity of the mode capitalism takes in its dissolution of partitions. But what is circulated as debt and credit is in fact not "real" money at all; what begins as "virtual" money gains interest, adding to the dematerialization of the monetary.

This aspect is one of the many central principles of capital's field of immanence: "Capitalism defines a field of immanence and never ceases to fully occupy this field. But this deterritorialized field finds itself determined by an axiomatic."^⁹ This axiomatic is "a set of equations and relationships that determines and combines variables and coefficients immediately and equally across various terrains without reference to prior and fixed definitions or terms."^¹⁰ As a reiteration of Deleuze's understanding of capitalism, Hardt and Negri state that capital "tends toward a smooth space defined by uncoded flows, flexibility, continual modulation, and tendential equalization."^¹¹

Capital is the new sovereignty insofar as its immanence is little more than a transcendent order. This is echoed in Hardt and Negri: "As national monetary structures tend to lose any characteristics of sovereignty, we can see emerging through them the shadows of a new unilateral monetary reterritorialization that is concentrated at the political and financial centers of Empire, the global cities...[I]t is a monetary construction based purely on the political necessities of Empire. Money is the imperial arbiter [and] this arbiter has neither a determinate location nor a transcendent status."^¹²

If capital's tendency is to condense and concentrate wealth in as few bodies as possible, the virtualization of money is an attempt to recode the flow to force capital into an illusory state of equilibrium, and this can only happen if all capital is actualized. But what is actualized is not the currency as either "hard" or "soft", but rather its relations of exchange. All capital exchange is actualized and made transparent: its relations across borders has allowed it to manifest itself everywhere. What makes capital an immanence of actualization rather than a true virtual immanence is its analogous relation with the properties of cancer.

John McMurtry's claim that a voracious money market capital places social equity in a state of perilous instability is perhaps more true when considering the theoretical nuances of virtual capital as immanent.^¹³ The system of attraction and repulsion between forms of stability between the axiomatic of virtual capital and the social matrix provides for a transmission of stabilizing and destabilizing features. That is, virtual capital is stabilized into an equilibrium at the expense of social equity. This equilibrium concerns only the interests of capital itself, and has no parallel effect on the social; in fact the relationship is inversely proportional just as the relationship between cancer and a healthy cell: at the rate of cancer's own benefit and growth, the health of the cell itself declines in proportion to this. As we factor this carcinogenic quality on a broader scale, concerning capital-cancer's effect on a more global model of many cells or nations, we witness the proliferation of capital-cancer as it dissolves all partitions: "The general equalization or smoothing of social space, however, in both the withering of civil society and the decline of national boundaries, does not indicate that social inequalities and segmentations have disappeared. On the contrary, they have in many respects become more severe."^¹⁴ This is to say that capital reorganizes or rearticulates the social according to its own interest and image.^¹⁵

This stabilization of virtual capital is completely indifferent to the social matrix and its stability from the start, and so the myopic capitalist strategy is to secure the equilibrium of capital with perhaps the adjacent hope that the social matrix will be benefited as an effect. But a collective good requires a more direct approach rather than to take the more neoconservative view that invigoration of business through finance capital (which thereby results in cuts to social programs) will all somehow "work out" to the advantage of the mores.

"Social breakdown under the strains of blind money-profit maximization was for a time resisted by newly accountable government bodies", but despite "this development of a social immune system...a relatively sudden mutation of social orders has recently emerged."^¹⁶ McMurtry continues to enumerate the bleak consequences of capitalist mutation and how this directly impacts the fragility of the social network. But perhaps what is more pertinent to our discourse, beyond the shocking forecast McMurtry presents, is his deployment of cancer as a metaphor for the late stage of capital, a metaphor we have here retained for its theoretical fecundity in analyzing and assessing the transition from transcendent mode of capital to an immanent mode. In sum, the uncontrolled and unregulated proliferation and reproduction of the capital agent that adiaphoristically negatively affects the host social body without assisting the host body in its regular social functions encompasses the very beginning of a severe dualism between the preservation of the social and the maintenance of the axiomatic of capital. Following this, carcinogenic capital appropriates "nutriments" from the host body for its own wild, metastasizing growth.^¹⁷ McMurtry indicates that cancer-capital operates "under the radar" of the social immune system that in itself is not equipped with a sufficient signal-response system to detect the carcinogenic agent, and so cannot respond and defend against what is otherwise an invasion of the social by a co-opting power of capital. Rather, the signal-response system is already under the power of capital in terms of a media communications system that is chiefly operated by a handful of conglomerates whose interests are very particularly capitalistic. Moreover, cancer-capital has the ability to extend itself and invade healthy cells on the periphery of its operation, which is to say that it has free movement throughout the global economy precisely because it imposes the image of this global economy upon those milieus that are still relatively self-sufficient or articulating their employment of capital in ways that are still nation-based. Once the image of the global is grafted upon the periphery, the partitions that once stood for the division of nations in the time of sovereignty are dissolved, and cancer-capital has free ingress to infect those areas. And, finally, the end result, says McMurtry, is the death of the host. Cancer-capital does not respond to the nutritive demands of the host itself, but rather parasitically draws upon necessary resources that would better benefit the host (such as clean air, labour capacity, oil, etc.). It is in this way that cancer-capital is indifferent to the social body qua its aims.

The question remains to be posed as to why the social body has not yet collapsed. Certainly, McMurtry gives suitable examples of the beginning of the decline, showing that the immanent mode of capital is the imminent end of the social. However, we would here append that the process of decline-however inevitable it may be-is delayed or deferred by the very special function of capital to reproduce itself as image, and to deploy this image as a temporary form of sustenance to the social body. The body is artificially sustained by the images and representations capital (re)produces in each of its nodes. There is always a sense of deferment of the death of the social as new crises force a condensation of capital into a given acute problem field, but the response is always somehow re-articulated in the interest of capital and the solution to a very acute crisis is generally a short-term solution that only serves to strengthen capital itself and exacerbate the social body in the long term. As in any logic of consumption, if no contingency plans are made to either consume more prudently the resources that sustain the social body, or to locate renewable forms of resources through alternatives, then the solutions cancer-capital employs to extremely acute crises is not sustainable. Moreover, cancer-capital's response to acute crises in the social are never altruistic, but always aims toward the artificial sustainability of the body only for as long as capital itself can continue its process of subsisting off the body and increasing its immanent code of dominance. But the end result is the same: if a parasitism is not indefinitely sustainable, then the body enervates and eventually expires.-The social cannot subsist off images or immediate short-term solutions forever. In fact, the situation for the social body is dire and perhaps even terminal: "the capitalist cancer increasingly diverts effective demand for use-value product on to its own growth and self-multiplication."^¹⁸ The significant problem facing the social body is that "the host body's immune system does not effectively recognize or respond to the cancer's challenge and advance."^¹⁹

One alternative to the lack of signal and response would be to utilize the media as a signal transmitter to the social body so that the latter can adequately respond to the threat. This solution is, however, idealistic and unfeasible on the grounds that the "capitalist organized media and information systems select for dissemination only messages that do not contradict the capitalist organization of social bodies."(McM8) Add to this the character of capitalist organized media to foment fear: "the fundamental content of the information that the enormous communication corporations present is fear. The constant fear of poverty and anxiety over the future are the keys to creating a struggle among the imperial proletariat. Fear is the ultimate guarantee of the new segmentations."^²⁰

McMurtry's solution is a seemingly simple one, but a solution fraught with almost insurmountable difficulties: "the social immune system must recognize the disease agent before it can effectively respond to its invasion. Only when this recognition is clear can an effective defense be mounted."^²¹(McM9). But in order for this solution to be realized, it would appear that this depends on the social body reclaiming what is now capitalist organized media. An insurgent movement of this order would require a great deal of organization and planning, but the first requirement of this solution is to disseminate knowledge of the threat. McMurtry's solution sets itself up for failure in the sense that the only way that the social body can be made aware of the cancerous threat of capital's effects is to disseminate information of this threat, but the means through which this can be achieved, i.e., capitalist organized media, is itself working in league with the capitalist ethos. This does not doom McMurtry's solution to unfeasibility per se if it can somehow be possible to co-opt the capitalist organized media to disseminate information contrary to its own aims. On these grounds we can concur, but it may be more fecund at this stage to append an added prerequisite that a major theoretical shift must occur that will either push capital to its absolute limit (the creative-destructive active nihilism of Nietzsche) and then to reorganize capitalism in a new articulation of virtual immanence. For this to be done, capital needs to be counter-actualized.

Exploring the link between capitalism and cancer in more thorough terms, the mutating property of capital as the tendency to reproduce itself "has no end, it has no exterior limit it could reach or even approximate. The tendency's limit is internal, and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit-that is, by reconstituting it, by rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement."^²² Contrary to the traditional transcendent model, there is no center to be found, no origin: capital is a constant displacement of center and origin. "If capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies, this is because capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by way of displacing it."^²³ The notion of center is not entirely abandoned, for capital relies on producing the image of a center in order to justify its actions on a periphery that it moves toward. It is in this sense that a "veritable 'development of underdevelopment' on the periphery ensures a rise in the rate of surplus value, in the form of an increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the center."^²⁴-Or, how capital appropriates production according to its own axiomatic. Again, a clear case of how reactive forces limit what active forces can do. Moreover, "capitalist deterritorialization is developing from the center to the periphery, the decoding of flows on the periphery develops by means of a 'disarticulation' that ensures the ruin of traditional sectors."^²⁵ This is enough to lend support to an argument that states that capital's in articulo vita is the in articulo mortis of the social.

Deleuze goes on to state "the ever widening circle of capitalism is completed, while reproducing its immanent limits on an even larger scale, only if the surplus value is not merely produced or extorted, but absorbed or realized."^²⁶ What Deleuze does not explicitly signify here is the very Hegelian character of capital. Capital proceeds dialectically through monocentering circles, resolving false binaries in the totality of capital itself. Capital sets up false contradictions everywhere, Self-Other, Center-Periphery, Developed-Underdeveloped, Modernized-Primitive, etc. the Odyssean movement of capital discovers itself in all that it is not, as an absolute exteriority, absorbs and levels all affirmative differences in the social by rearticulating the Other as lack, and then repatriates itself within the center. Through a process of negative determinations, the reactive character of capital as a carcinogenic nihilism subverts the active forces of social production beyond its limit and absorbs everything within the immanent sphere of complete determination. "Capitalism's supreme goal, which is to produce lack in the large aggregates, to introduce lack where there is always too much, by effecting the absorption of overabundant resources."^²⁷ Integration of the social productive forces within the carcinogenic system of capital's immanent totality is how capital sustains its own metastasizing growth. "The co-opting power of capitalism...its axiomatic is not more flexible, but wider and more englobing. In such a system no one escapes participation in the activity of antiproduction that drives the entire productive system."^²⁸ If the parallel between the Hegelian and capitalist systems is retained with any degree of seriousness, we must be made aware of all the caveats that come with disputing the former. That is, to directly confront either Hegel or capital is to be led back and reabsorbed by Hegelianism or capitalism. Both Hegel and capital, by virtue of their systems, cannot be confronted directly without resorting to the very dialectical method that would thereby ensure their verity. Foucault's statement that at the end of history awaits Hegel is perhaps equally applicable to capital. An alternative needs to be devised that does not utilize a negative dialectics of opposition.

Our own cancer-capital analogy extends beyond McMurtry's fine exposition insofar as it summarizes the composite viewpoints of McMurtry and Deleuzians such as Hardt, and neo-marxists such as Negri. Moreover, the actual scientific terms employed grant us a new trajectory of thinking capital as oncological. We do not claim to exhaust the possibilities and linkages here, but rather enumerate a brief itemized list:^²⁹

Not only is the content of labour, the content of the social (the one who wields both quantifiable wealth and labour capacity) merely arbitrary and adjacent figures to the regime of virtual capital, but the content of capital itself (the constituent components of wealth involved in exchange) are now equally merely figural representations. And so, on both sides, the wielder and the wielded of wealth are little more than variables in a larger tangential function toward the englobing metastasis of capital as it proceeds to deterritorialize older regimes of "primitive" codes in a flow from a "center" to the "periphery." Individuals locked up in the game of capital's expansion are nothing more than statistical variables, and slight deviations from a more encompassing function set toward the appropriation and consumption of new milieus. Once this is effected, capital can turn on itself and appropriate its own inner limits, reproducing for itself images. Personified capital and "capitalized" personhood: their mutual arbitrariness is not to be taken to mean that there can be a seamless substitution between the two, but that both person and capital as individuations are hollowed out and put into play as vehicles of a meta-capital axiomatic. As capital submerged into the false virtual, becoming actualized and no longer revealing its theoretical "origin", it brought along in this descent the wielder of capital who must-in order to participate-be actualized...that is, to divest the self and mint a new Self that is both the actualization of capital-as-personified-in-the-Self-as-image. This new image is of "virtual" capital.

Movement of capital creates excess. This excess is not lost but reabsorbed as image, completing the circle of production-consumption. It is no longer the case, contra Bataille, that an excess maximal investment of energy is squandered in some glorious dissolution, but that capital has a relay uptake system that allows it to reabsorb excess and reproduce this excess as image rather than to be mere exudation. The excess forms the constituent components for the manufacture of the virtual image. Although much of Bataille's reading of general economy can now be considered outdated and inapplicable to the current situation of capital, what we may retain are the components of the analysis which have indicated the problems facing capital that have since been overcome in its continuation of an immanent mode. Of course, many of the problems Bataille raises have only been temporarily abated by capital's transition to immanence, but these problems will once again return to haunt capital at the point when it has reached its absolute limit.

Firstly, Bataille understands the problem of capital spatially rather than temporally. The more immanent quality of capital is its ability to inscribe itself upon the temporal order as a perpetual displacement and becoming-other. As Bataille quite "spatially" notes, "it is the size of the terrestrial space that limits overall growth."^³⁰(B AC 29). Bataille assumes a synchrony between capital and labour, production and consumption. But, as we have noted above, capital and the social do not operate synchronically, but rather that capital is diachronic. The diachrony of capital is what grants it the power to itself remain immanent and to reorganize or segment the social. Moreover, in conceiving of the problem of capital in terms of time, Deleuze is able to illustrate that the terrestrial limit is not a true limit, for capital can always reterritorialize itself according to inner limit. Even in consideration of a somewhat mundane example, we can see how this is the case: commercial advertising is always devising new strategies to reterritorialize upon its own terrain. That is, billboards can be erected between billboards, people can be paid to have ads painted on their back windshields, some Internet services come with a flurry of pop-ups (and with the advent of pop-up blocker software, the reterritorialization of the Internet space took the form of "pop-unders" that the software could not block-yet another instance of the unstoppable seepage of advertising and capital), and so forth, all examples of how a spatial zone can constantly be reterritorialized according to internal limits. The compounding of advertising within an already advertisement-glutted zone is but a very minor example of a larger phenomenon.

Secondly, Bataille points out that "if there is no outlet anywhere, nothing bursts; but the pressure is there."^³¹ Once again, Bataille is operating under an overly spatialized understanding of capital. However, he is correct to invoke the notion of pressure insofar as capital does respond to zones where its pressures are not felt, where there is a vacuum. These vacuums allow capital to rush in and deterritorialize these spaces, to infect them. In order for capital to be able to continue in its process of reproducing its own image, it must constantly appropriate production from its "periphery", and so when the pressure-quotient of production to appropriate is low in its own domain, it must locate new sources beyond its boundaries to be included in its totality. But supposing "there is no longer any growth possible, what is to be done with the seething energy that remains?"^³² We must here concede to Bataille on this point, for Deleuze's claim that capital could indefinitely reproduce itself seems counter-intuitive. There needs to be some maximum point of saturation, a point when the social bodies in a global network have been segmented to their extreme and there is no more production to appropriate. However, even Deleuze holds the view that this saturation point is possible, and that the closure of capital's growth is a result of capital going to its limit and succumbing to its own logic of consumption. That is, in a different way than Bataille's claim that capital or Reason can attain its limit and expire, Deleuze will claim that capital's reproduction of images will eventually plunge it into the depths. That is, capital will desire its own demise at the very point that it has assimilated and leveled out all differences. These differences, or appropriations of production will create a toxic mixture within the very constitution of capital which will result in a point of rupture, thus beginning the process of counter-actualization. In terms of pressure, Bataille explains "a pressure everywhere equal to itself would result in a state of rest, in a general substitution of heat loss for reproduction. But real pressure has different results: It puts unequal organisms in competition with one another."^³³ But what is truly unequal is the relation between capital and the social. The pressure capital exerts upon the social in order to reproduce image and create surplus value will result in the complete absorption of the social. When this occurs, capital will have nothing left to appropriate, and will, once again, desire its own demise. Capital thrives on the inequality it creates in the social, but its tendency is toward a complete appropriation and equilibrium state. However, if it achieves this objective of complete equilibrium, it will begin to rupture from within.

Bataille makes an interesting point that "possible growth is reduced to a compensation for the destructions that are brought about."^³⁴ And in fact, capital justifies its own extension of itself into new milieus by deterritorializing these milieus, thereby destroying nation-economies and traditional forms of capital exchange, but it does so precisely through subversion and not an outright destruction. In fact the actual destruction has yet to occur, and can only come about if capital goes to its absolute limit when it completes its own nihilistic project. But this form of destruction, this nihilism, is complete insofar as it will have nothing left to appropriate or exploit, and so will perform this destruction upon itself. Bataille further warns that growth "is by nature a transitory state. It cannot continue indefinitely."^³⁵ And although this is correct, it should be noted that the growth of capital can only cease once it has successfully appropriated all production.

In terms of giving and the gift, capital can "give" nothing more than itself, its own "zero point" of equilibrium. Capital, already defined and non-delineated as immanent, has a value of nil, whereas that which it seeks to consume, appropriate, and transmute outside of it (modes into nodes) has a value of +1. If capital is motivated by what it yet does not have, would it not have a value of -1 in order to fulfill itself as a utopic harmony of 0? This would only be the case if the image were subtracted from capital's auto-production, which is to say that this is impossible. It is already in itself full, and the image it produces is the credit it extends beyond its limit to which the only restitution possible to repay the debt is for the older regimes to open its border to capital's invasive metastasis. A value of +/- 1 is contingent upon there being striations or partitions. But this level of organization of capital is defunct; socially it is not that labour determines capital, but vice versa in such a way that the immanence of capital smoothes out all striations as a one-all. Its ubiquity is guaranteed by its axiomatic, but this axiomatic is the source of a veiled new form of transcendence, with the chief difference being that no sovereign-subject governs over the horizon-just the image of a center and an origin.

Deleuze muses "perhaps the flows [of capital] are not yet deterritorialized enough"^³⁷ which is to say that nihilism is not yet complete. Capitalism as cancer is nihilistic, but it needs to succumb to its own logic of consumption and be brought to a critical point of rupture. "The capitalist State completes the becoming-concrete so fully that, in another sense, it alone represents a veritable rupture with this becoming, a break with it."^³⁸ This is the first stage of capital's counter-actualization.

A useful heuristic tool for explaining counter-actualization is by recourse to oncology. Cancer is a metastasis of cells, a wild and unchecked growth that eventually consumes and destroys the host. Apoptosis is the process by which cells are limited and destroyed before metastasis can take place. Apoptosis is, simply put, planned obsolescence, or pre-programmed cell death. Taken in another way, metastasis is the becoming-active of forces in the descent to the virtual, and apoptosis is the becoming-reactive of forces in actualization. However, as we will demonstrate, the roles of metastasis and apoptosis switch in the inverted image of capital; that is, metastasis serves the aims of actualization toward the constitution of universals just as counter-actualization itself has a mode of apoptosis that resists the static and inverted image of capital.. The "cancer" of actualization is deleterious while for counter-actualization it is a beneficial destruction that opens the way for a logic of production rather than consumption.

Actualization operates by what we call a logic of consumption. That is, the aim of capital's actualization is to appropriate all production and encase it into universal categories for capital. It is the desire to actualize, a will-to-actualize that motors this process. This form of desire posits objects as idealizations and moves toward their idealizations in the depths. However, what it is truly chasing is nothing more than a projected inverted image of the real, and once the "object" of desire is achieved, this is followed by a malaise, a fatigue or exhaustion brought upon by a feeling of lack and dissatisfaction. By universalizing objects under categories, this falsely exhausts the content of objects and denies the many ways in which the object can be expressed. Madness results from this dissatisfaction (a mid-life crisis is an example) and there are two possible responses: resignation (passive nihilism and the desire to fade away) and insurgency (active nihilism). The metastasis of this logic of consumption is precisely the metastasis of universals in capitalism under which all of life is depreciated; it is also the metastasis of consumption itself as it can do nothing more than appropriate and consume. This logic of consumption eventually succumbs to its own logic, consuming and eventually negating itself-an Uroboros. This logic is seen in common profusion within the social, especially in terms of habit and comfort and the vain belief that particular objects will bring about the completion and validity of the Self. That is, when it becomes a moral Good to achieve a state of peaceful equilibrium, to obtain those objects that are invested by capital with the belief of their ability to provide this equilibrium, to structure a life under the grand ought of desirable things to facilitate the comfort and reinforce the habit of a "promised" life, this is when life is depreciated and reduced to the value of nil. The person who has projected this transcendental Good and follows the strictures of the ought out of a desire to attain this transcendentally harmonious Good through whatever means (the attainment of property, material acquisitions, the Christian demand of being fruitful and multiplying as the ethical duty to validate oneself through the transcendental category of Family, etc.) realizes perhaps in the depths of Self a certain dissatisfaction at the point when these features of the allegedly "successful" life are acquired. It is then that the Self succumbs to a kind of existential crisis where it reflects upon the meaning of having structured life in such a way, and realizes soon thereafter that these objects-for-desire, these large and baggy moral oughts, do not access the true character of the real. Moreover, the prudence by which such a Self lives, the way in which it seeks to rig outcomes and deny chance through several means as to exclude or barricade a life from the fortuitousness of contingent events takes the form of so many insurance policies and financial investment strategies to protect the Self from losing all it has acquired. And, indeed, what is the underlying logic of a suburb but a place where one can take a family away from the heterogeneity of the city and to live in a utopic homogeneous setting where all homes resemble one another and there is a common majoritarian value that unites the inhabitants? Or, consider the logic of consumption in action in social interaction wherein we most commonly congregate together in social settings to consume products and services, be it meeting over coffee or taking in a movie. The mania for consumption operates as an almost unconscious force, yet it still is linked to a transcendental moral ought: I shop therefore I am.

The apoptotic function of the logic of consumption is reactivity: to assimilate sameness from the different, to expel true difference through a series of determinations, and to deny chance. By excluding true difference through subsumption under universal categories (limiting what active forces can do), the process of actualization equilibrates the world according to a static, banal, and predictable image that denies or attempts to blockade chance. The Uroboros is the mascot of actualization, for its principle is to assimilate its other or shadow by devouring its own tail. The Uroboros engages in an act of killing itself and being reborn, but it is the rebirth of the same. Just as in the stage of negative nihilism, man denies life by creating a supersensible world and a God, he then murders God and takes his place, thereby performing an act of sameness: the creation of a transcendental plane. The Uroboros is the time of capitalism, and the scene of its devouring and recreation of self is the privileged present. The circle is infinite, but the variety of infinite that is only circuitous movement. Apoptosis assimilates the resemblance the past and future have with the present while denying or annihilating from itself the differences. Apoptosis in capitalism banishes differences while metastasis is merely the genesis of sameness.

The characteristic functions of metastasis and apoptosis in counter-actualization operate on a logic of production. What metastasizes is the fracturing of the once unified 'I' into an infinite bifurcation into true differences of nature. The apoptosis function of counter-actualization takes place when it expels the last vestiges of the negative in the act of transmutation or active negation. A logic of production is a creative and generative activity, for it is the desire to produce infinite and divergent variations across a plane of immanence. It is the affirmative act that leads to joy. No longer under the tyranny of the universal, difference is free to be different in the affirmative sense, no longer assimilated as an other. This production is an excretion, but the excretion of the negative. It is the moment when the plane of transcendence succumbs to the rupture and empties its heavy bowels in an act of necessary purgation.

Counter-actualization is an apoptosis insofar as the pre-programmed death of the organi(ci)sm is the result of actualization going to its limit and expiring, going mad and negating the metastasis of transcendental images that do nothing more than cause despair. Counter-actualization becomes a counter-memory (the act of forgetting universals) and a counter-desire (as desire negatively defined in terms of lack). Counter-actualization is a metastasis insofar as it engenders a logic of production where the active forces of difference freely express their difference without the apoptotic function of actualization as a becoming active of forces. It is the present that is emptied and infinitely split by the play of forces of the past and future. It is this character of the virtual and the immanent that can truly be called thus, whereas capitalism is only the image of the virtual and the image of immanence.

Derrida's question, What is Economy? resonates for us: "economy no doubt includes the values of law (nomos) and of home (oikos, home, property, family, the hearth, the fire indoors). Nomos does not only signify the law in general, but also the law of distribution (nemein), the law of partition (moira), the given or assigned part, participation."^³⁹ A little further on in the passage, he states that as soon as there is law, "there is partition: as soon as there is nomy, there is economy."^⁴⁰ But can there be an eco-anomy? Is not the immanently smooth space of capital as such an eco-anomaly? If so, then (immanent) capital can have no return (unless to itself as a veiled process) and no surplus, i.e., it is pure absorption and re-production. Nothing returns to cancer-capital but its own image reflected at the very absolute limit of the cellular partition and as a projected image beyond the cellular-national partitions. The parergon of national economies outside of capital's exuberant metastasizing reach become little more than a leaky frame through which capital can gain hold as a sort of seepage. The projection of its image (as lack) facilitates its flow where it can then pool and recommence its metastasis until the entire globe is made to resonate with its imposed global-capital equilibrium. The figure of eco-anomaly is particularly pertinent to the continuing function of capital as a carcinogen, for it depends on reproducing its own anomalous image in rank repetition of an illusory center or origin that does not truly exist. That is, capital acts as though it appeals to a principle dictated by a center that organizes and regulates actions on the periphery, but this center is little more than a collective fiction of a capitalist laity. And it is precisely this absent throne of the "centre" or "origin" which furnishes economy-belief and creates a new (albeit illusory) transcendent order. It is this constantly destabilized center that capital constantly recreates as an image. If anything jeopardizes the claim that capital is actually immanent, it would be its creation of a transcendent image at the very summit of its image-reproduction. Capital functions as though it were immanent, and as though the transcendent center was there in full.

Capital functions as a "superconductor" of its own furiously reproduced image. However, the mass reproduction of images in capitalism is hypertelic, and so its function far exceeds, and is a deviation from, the social body and its functional aims. Just as now capital determines labour, capital no longer serves the social; the social is organized within capital in a false virtual milieu without any structure. A hypertrophy of capital follows along on its own exuberant course while the social field continues to atrophy in their new "segmentations."

To counter-actualize capital would be to push capital's seemingly innate principle of metastasis and consumption to its limit, bringing it to the critical mass of rupture. Its tendency will already inevitably bring it to this point, but the scene of creation immediately following this conflagration of capital's image will most definitely require the skills and creative adeptness of a people to come.

1 Gilles Deleuze. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 225.

3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) 326.

13 John McMurtry. "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: Our social immune system is being overwhelmed by growing out-of-control money market cancer" dl October 18, 2003...http://www.flora.org/library/mai/cancer.html originally published in the CCPA Monitor, July/August 1996.

15 This results in what Hardt and Negri will call "the society of control" as a shift from the disciplinary society. In an immanent network such as capital, there are no masters or disciplinarians, but rather the social body is made to regulate itself without a transcendent figure to dictate law. Deleuze also speaks of the social as being reorganized as a collective of slaves who regulate their own slavery. Although this issue is of considerable merit, we cannot permit ourselves the luxury of exploring it further here.

17 This enumeration is abstracted from McMurtry, "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism" 5.

29 Abstracted from Douglas Hanohan and Robert A. Weinberg, "The Hallmarks of Cancer" Cell v. 100 57-70, Jan. 7^th 2000

30 Georges Bataille. The Accursed Share v. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 29.

36 Counter-actualization is a concept introduced and well defined by Gilles Deleuze. See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, Difference and Repetition, and an analogue of how this functions in chapter five of Nietzsche and Philosophy.

39 Jacques Derrida. Given Time:1. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 6.