Vogl stimulates a debate about the singularity of modern finance, which can only be conducted by replacing the image of an overly resolute capitalism with the image of a society open to the future.
Machinations of capital remain machinations here as well. However, the economic scope of certain social constellations and the chances of political intervention can be assessed more realistically. To this end, it is not least necessary not to confuse the theorem of a functional differentiation of society with the idea of culturally homogeneous and institutionally coherent subsystems. Systems are more open, more fragile and more "retrospectively" (Urs Stäheli) constructed than their reception often implies.
From France comes the suggestion to assume a functional differentiation rather on the level of discourses and contexts of reasoning or of domains, i.e. fields of expertise, areas of knowledge, than on the level of actions and communications as assumed by systems theory. This could be worthwhile, because then the view becomes free for the real structure of networks of different practices, organizations, institutions and systems, which are more heterogeneous, hybrid and complex than many modern theories have imagined so far. And this fits Harrison C. White's understanding of a network as a calculus of uncertainty, which makes it possible both to appreciate interests and strategies in their Path dependence and to observe them as they confront ongoing threats. >> path dependence
Conceptual conversions of this kind do not solve the current debt crisis. But they are necessary to find institutional answers to it. And it helps to be aware of the paradigmatic and methodological significance of one's own scientific approach. Vogl confidently refrains from discussing his assumptions and approaches. This is stimulating because it is immediately about the matter at hand. But the matter is not about the matter. It can be interpreted differently; and these differences are themselves instructive. Like Vogl, we can assume that after 2006, policymakers, with their billion-dollar support programs, were held hostage by commercial banks that no longer saw through their own Ponzi schemes. But we can also assume that these Ponzi schemes of securitized loans and loan packages were, for their part, an attempt to implement the policy of an American central bank that was trying to promote real estate ownership by the American middle class with a massive increase in the money supply.
In order to be able to discuss this, however, we have to disclose our scientific approach. Vogl's wide-awake look at the narratives of political and economic theories can also be read as an invitation to take this look at one's own approach as well. No one says that one can then no longer get to the point. And no one is saying that the point is precisely not to include in the historicity and complexity of a social finding like the workings of modern finance the discourses that derive their performative effects from illuminating certain aspects and obscuring others. A theory is a metadatum to be measured by what data it is able to sort and how. It must also be possible to vary this metadatum. That seems to me to be the meaning of an overdue debate between the cultural, economic, and social sciences. No occasion for this debate is more appropriate than Vogl's reconstruction of the seigniorial power at the center of the blind spot of the entanglement of political and economic calculations.
Vogl insists on the concept of capitalism: "For the scope of this term, which historians claim comes back through the window after being thrown out the door, is neither reducible to the designation of free-market principles nor to the circumscription of economic systems in general. Rather, since the end of the nineteenth century, the coinage of the term has been linked to a historical way of problematizing that includes not only economic forms, corporate structures, and property relations but also political, cultural, and mentality-historical parameters (p. 116). Vogl gives the term a "diagrammatic" contour (p. 102 et passim) that is able to reckon with heterogeneity, nonlinearity, and complexity.
This makes it possible to use the tools of cultural studies, that is, a combination of historical-genealogical and narrative-discourse analytical knowledge, to reconstruct the singular shape of a financial system that does not necessarily have to be called, this would be Dirk Baecker's objection, "capitalist."
For the concept of capitalism cannot be had without the critique of its inherent political economy. This critique is no longer only, with Kant, the examination of the conditions of a possibility, but, with Marx and Foucault, the attempt "not to be governed in such a way." If one understands capitalism with Vogl as an attempt to "transform future riches into present profits and capitalize unforeseeable futures" (p. 250), and as a functional condition of the reproduction of domination – "As an elementary capitalist mode of action, investments transfer funds in order to reproduce social relations of dependence and structures of obligation" (p. 117) this turn of critique into the rejection of the relations cannot be avoided.
And there are enough reasons to reject the relations. What is in question, however, is whether the historical singularity whose story is told here can rather be broken down to the difference of domination and dependence or to that of present and future. "Capital" can be defined vis-à-vis "labor" as exploitation or vis-à-vis "future" as provision. One is historically diagrammatically intertwined with the other. And political as well as economic calculations use the possibility of threatening violence because the future is uncertain, and promising a fortune if one provides the necessary resources to that threat and the willingness to yield to it. But is this, Dirk Baecker repeats himself, capitalism or society? If it were capitalism, one would have to assume that things could be done differently, but that the opponent has the better cards. If it is society, one would have to assume that there is no other way, but that the cards are always redistributed between politics and business, law and science, art and religion, taking into account the respective current balance of power.
It is true that mainstream political and economic theories have their blind spot where economic and political calculations are intertwined in dealing with an uncertain future. What this is due to is not so easy to say. Certainly, in both cases one is dealing with theories of reflection, which do not have to question the functionality of their subject areas, but to prove it. Therefore, economic theories concentrate on the proof of allocative efficiency and the correction of allocative inefficiency, while political theories are concerned with legitimation procedures and legitimacy deficits. In one case, the focus is on the factual dimension, in the other on the social dimension of meaning production. In the perhaps very "modern" hope that the division of labor will succeed, both the dependence of one dimension on the other is obscured and the third dimension, the time dimension of meaning, is neglected. >> meaning factual dimension social time
That is why we need a critique of political economy, as Marx presented it and as it aims at both proving and formulating as an objection against the rationality assertion of this division of labor the mutual claim of material and social dimension, of productive forces and relations of production, from the point of view of domination, exploitation and externalization of all "ecological" costs. But this is done at the price of new blind spots, as we know. Consumers, markets, and managers do not appear in Marx's diagram. But they belong in the diagram just as much as the financial system, which has been the focus of capitalism theory since Hilferding, and the consumption of non-renewable resources, to which ecological movements, climate and biodiversity researchers alike draw attention. They belong in the diagram because the sovereignty effects that Vogl analyzes also draw their persistence from their vectors. They bring into play a factual and social turbulence that first forces us both to think of the future as unknown and to make this very idea the dominant integrating figure of all the calculations involved. Far from being able to fix this future by whatever speculation, it becomes more uncertain by every bet on it.
Sovereigns are those who can transform their own Dangers into Risks in which others are willing to participate. The result is called a Network. This sovereignty can be burdened with any guilt. But woe betide when everyone else's risk calculations no longer work out. >> danger risk network
~
BAECKER, Dirk, 2015. Der blinde Fleck des „Kapitalismus“: Zu Joseph Vogls Buch „Der Souveränitätseffekt“. Zeitschrift für Germanistik. 2015. Vol. 25, no. 3, p. 635–642.