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what matters is continuity of movement, the continuance of flows, not what flows. the objects that move through these systems are secondary to the fact of their movement. trafficking in debt means that value is a temporal form, not a 1:1 relation--so it's not about objects, not about thinking with or through objects...it's thinking motion, systems that allow it, and relations which are structured in and through that movement. value is a convention--but it's always been convention, nothing more. the value of gold was a convention and the assumption about that convention was that scarcity (or at least limitation) of supply functioned to anchor that convention in something outside itself--but that too was a convention. and what mattered was the movement of these conventional objects--these time-forms, like sounds---through particular systems. when you extract "value" from the systems of circulation, you convert media, but the conversion of media doesn't mean that you move from a system anchored in circulation to something else--you just move from one circulatory system to another.
the entire idea of the old marxian labor theory of value was to anchor value to praxis, acting on nature, transforming nature into usable objects, as a way of making it more "material"----but even there value was located in labor power, in process, and it's object-expression---commodities---was seen as "dead labor"....
i don't know why this is surprising, that the anchors of bourgeois "reality" are basically objectifications of modes of being that are basically motion or pattern within motion (another metaphor that you could plug into the above and run the machinery).
what matters is not the relation to materiality, not the relation between process (which is temporal) to the object-oriented world that we see and live through because we see it---what matters is the equity of modes of allocation, what matters is the distribution of power. in contemporary capitalism, we--you and i---have NO power. we are spectators. this is a form of spectatorship. and it also turns out that the institutions we assumed DID have power do not have it--not really--what has power is the flowing of capital within abstract networks. that rules the world, the world that neoliberalism has enabled.
better to watch tv, i sometimes think.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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