Well burrowed, old mole!

A society’s most potent taboos are shadows of its highest values. 

Consider prostitution in relation to the historical institution of marriage; both involve an intimate exchange: the former producing money, the latter producing capital. Taboos are ontologically necessary preconditions of the “sacred.”  In order for the sacred to be, it needs to enjoy something we can call a ‘semiotic monopoly.’ Its signs must remain pure; irony is to be avoided at all costs.  In other words, the sacred gestures and ritual attitudes must not be appropriated without warrant: there must be strict and pitiless felicity conditions imposed.  Violations of these conditions of felicity are called taboos, and they carry strong punishments, not the least of which is the imputation of insanity, being declared mad.      

      These taboos are thus revealed as political.  Punishment without written law is one form of political struggle, even if it does not appear to us as a very just one.   The taboo can be said to be the first institution, pre-dating even marriage which Vico refers to as the first “human institution.” Following Vico, it seems to me that “solemn nuptials” would not be possible without a strong set of preexisting taboos, which he would refer to as “divine institutions.  As he puts it in his New Science:

10        On the altar near the lituus may be seen the water and fire, the former contained in a jar. For with a view to divination sacrifices arose among the gentiles from that common custom of theirs which the Latins called procurare auspicia, i.e. to sacrifice in order to understand the auguries well so that the divine warnings or commands of Jove might be properly carried out. These are the divine things among the gentiles, from which came later all their human things.

11        The first of these [human things] was marriage, symbolized by the torch lit from the fire on the altar and leaning against the jar. For marriage, as all statesmen agree, is the seed-plot of the family, as the family is the seed-plot of the commonwealth. To denote this, the torch, although it is the hieroglyph of a human thing, is placed on the altar along with the water and the fire, which are hieroglyphs of divine ceremonies; just as the ancient Romans celebrated nuptials aqua et igni, because it was understood that by divine counsel these two common things (and, before fire even, perennial water as a thing more necessary to life) had led men to live in society. (7-8)

      Thus, we can see a significant overlap between human and divine institutions, the divine or heroic institutions enable the human institutions.  In other words, secular ‘modern’ institutions rely on something formulated in a different mode, unintelligible to modernity.  Secular, democratic political discourse relies on a set of never-fully explicit axioms—we can call them endoxa-which serve as a horizon of intelligibility for arguments.  Modernity does not know how to call these institutions political because the processes associated with these institutions fabricate the terms from which modernity operates. Through them a different type of power is wielded, or a different but complementary phenomenon of power takes place.

      ii.

    The monetary signifier is one of semblance, which rests on social conventions. The financial universe is an architecture made of fictions and its keystone is what Lacan called a “subject supposed to know”, to know why and how. Who plays this part? The concert of authorities, from where sometimes a voice is detached, Alan Greenspan, for example, in his time. The financial players base their behavior on this. The fictional and hyper-reflexive unit holds by the “belief” in the authorities, i.e. through the transference to the subject supposed to know. If this subject falters, there is a crisis, a falling apart of the foundations, which of course involves effects of panic.

Jacques-Alain Miller ’The Financial Crisis’

         We now realize something which has been true for some time: capitalism is self-destructing in the face of its chance to establish a global monopoly.  The U.S.S.R fell, and capitalism appeared to be the only option.  With the united states as the world’s sole superpower, it seemed that there would be a pax venalici with the market taking the day, and abolishing history all at once.  How close we all came to believing that it was natural for a person to live or die based on their ability to get a job.  Free-Market Capitalism has had the power to put its vision into practice on as radical a scale as Lenin, or Mao.

      People knew that this system was not capable of triumph.  That it would either destroy itself in the process of transformation into something better, or just destroy itself.  The results seem to be in.  History will continue.  Politics will be resumed.   Perhaps it is worthwhile to narrate a certain portion of the story of capitalism in finer detail.   This will help to bring out the absurdity and delirium embodied in the capitalist vision.

       Capital tends toward monopoly.  The pursuit of profit, of expansion for its own sake, is the logic of capital, and the conclusion toward which this logic drives is monopoly.  However, under capitalism, what we have is a large mass of discreet, atomized forces driving toward a monopoly which they cannot reach: total market saturation is not possible, as free-market social theory tells us: there is no society; they are only individuals.  Monopoly is the object of capital’s desire; it is as intoxicating as absolute power.

       Monopoly is the point of qualitative change which is the limit of the horizon of capitalism.  This fantasy of capital is the image of a point of qualitative change as it is visible to capital, the moment at which a new logic would be necessary.  Capitalism cannot achieve a social monopoly such as the one it seemed to be heir to after the cold war because it needs competition and division in order to operate.  If the social monopoly were achieved we would need a logic of struggle together instead of the capitalist logic of struggle against.