Media and mediating activity

The subject of the modern world is comprised of human beings acting upon it in concert. As we apply our subjectivity in constructing the modern world so we also expend our labour in producing it. Yet in current conditions the results of our labour are not ours to dispose of. As human subjects are exploited, so too are the objects of our own making commandeered by another object, capital. Moreover, the capacity to initiate the production of objects also belongs to capital. To say that this object usurps the sovereignty of the human subject is to suggest that the reality of exploitation as captured in economic terms is complemented by corresponding realities requiring cognate terms from philosophy; furthermore, it is to say that both modern philosophy and political economy are terminologies with common origins in capital as a social relation. The concerted activity of human beings in production is conducted by capital;

capital conducts labour. Like an orchestral conductor, capital is the intermediary between various producers. Also in the manner of a conductor capital gives the tempo to labour: it is our maestro. Here the intermediary is also the voice of unwarranted authority. The unexpectedly authoritarian voice accompanying capital’s intermediary role is echoed in the way that the market, which in other circumstances might be nothing more than a patch of middle ground where commodities are exchanged, currently holds sway over the production of commodities, just as capital cities, typically the location of the largest markets, lord it over provincial sites of production, even though the authority of the former is ultimately derived from the latter. Similarly, the commanding role of mediation reveals itself again in the humble orientation of commodities towards money, which is the intermediary between them just as they are intermediaries between the people who produced them. Both the fetishism of commodities, as Marx described it, and the fetish of commodities for money are prompted by capital’s double life as both mediator and master. That mediation is central to society should not come as a surprise. As we have

shown, modern levels of socialisation emerged alongside the development of a third position, in the middle between two parties – people and objects – which are, respectively, commensurate and exchangeable. Thus the mediating position, to which commodity owners are drawn and from which they look upon the

world as a choice between commensurate possibilities and exchangeable outcomes, has been integral to socialisation. In the contemporary version of this scenario, however, there is also an anti-

social element. The antisocial comes to the fore when the mediating position at the centre of society is primarily occupied not by people but by capital. In conditions where the centre is capitalised, the mediating position is not only the place where subjects associate; it also comes to be associated with the domination of objects over human subjects. It is here that the current form of socialisation obstructs further social development. Capital is the form of mediation which has risen above its station to become

the primary social relation of our times. It is thus the intermediary object which displaces the human subject. Indeed, it transcends the distinction between subject and object. It is transcendent; but at the same time dependent. As capital takes on a life of its own, so it relies on the expenditure of human life in the process of capitalist production. Our social reality is formed by this discrepancy, and our lives are lived in the shadow of its countless manifestations. Commodities, the cell form of capitalist production, are hard-wired with that version of it which is presented in the duality of use value and exchange value. Marx set out this duality in the opening chapter of his Capital (1887), in order to establish that contradiction is fundamental to capitalist production relations, having previously established (in The German Ideology, 1845-6) that the relations of capitalist production are also the societal relations of our time, i.e. they are the primary relations in which society is constituted. In the three volumes of Capital, his summative work, Marx established the

essentially unstable character of these historically specific production relations. But his earlier work had already opened up another field requiring further investigation. The dual character of capital, the coexistence in capital of transcendent and dependent qualities at one and the same time, is further expressed in a second field of duality, namely, the simultaneous coexistence of societal relations in which people are subject to capital and interpersonal relations in which they are their own subjects. Thus, in capitalist society, humanity itself comes to replicate the duality of capital as both dependent subject and transcendent object: as subjects we are dependent on the object that is capital; meanwhile, it is only our subjectivity, objectified as labour power, which can transform one object into another, thereby expanding the system of objects that includes capital itself. In one set of relations, namely, production relations, human subjects are

objectified by capital: we become things subject to it. These are the relations by which capital expands itself through the deployment of labour in the production of goods. Moreover, such relations provide the material basis for society as a whole so that what we are is in large part constituted by what we do within these historically specific relations in particular. However, in that capital accumulation depends on the objectification of human subjects – in production we become the commodity labour-power – it is also dependent on the creation and continuous recreation of human beings as interrelated subjects; for if we are not subjects in

the first instance, neither can capital expand itself by reducing us to its objects. Thus capital itself is as dependent on this second set of relations, in which human beings are subjects, as it is upon the prior set of (production) relations in which it objectifies us. In order for it to be transcendent, capital turns out to be doubly dependent; it depends on two sets of relations which are at odds with each other; and this further duality constitutes a secondary field which exists alongside the duality already inherent in the prior set of production relations. Confronted by whole fields of such discrepancy, human subjects customarily

respond by trying to put them in order. We have devised coping strategies for our dual existence, i.e. strategies that allow us to cope with its duality; and by our efforts the disjuncture between production relations and intersubjective relations is rendered into a more or less manageable sequence of contradictions. Conversely, by this same process, the distance between these two sets of relations is reconfigured as a continuum that allows each to exist in reciprocal relationship with the other. Contradictions are not resolved in this process; rather, they are constructed

and reconstructed at every point. But instead of an unbridgeable gap between production relations and intersubjective relations, there is now a series of stepping stones, each one representing a field of contradictory experiences. Although they all contain contradictions, each stepping stone is also a form of mediating activity, and the variety of mediating forms includes the state, politics, media and the family. They are unstable but strong enough to enable human beings to speak against (contradict) their objectification, while, to the contrary, capital retains the capacity to objectify human subjects. Thus both capitalist production relations and relations between individual human subjects are sustained, and their coexistence maintained, by a sequence of mediating activities which normally succeed in containing contradiction as well as representing it. Accordingly, both the coexistence of these relations and the discrepancy between them are represented in a relatively orderly series of contradictions. This sort of mediating activity entails the exercise of human subjectivity upon

the discrepancy between the two sets of relations in which we are currently obliged to live. Mediation is not a process that happens automatically (though the seemingly spontaneous reproduction of capitalist production relations could not continue without it), nor is it a process that occurs only in logic. Rather, it is a social process characterised by historical human activity, activity that mediates between the multiple clusters of direct relations among human subjects and the unified system of object-relations in which the self-same human subjects are related to each other only indirectly and in accordance with the continuous movement of capital to labour. The historical development of capital has conditioned its mediation. Similarly,

the continuous movement of capital and labour has repeatedly reconditioned the forms of their mediation and redrawn the relations between one form of mediating activity and another. Thus, what constitutes politics, media and the family is changeable; so too are the relations between them, just as the significance of each relative to the whole is also variable.