9.6.1The gainful game

According to the late Marx, who radicalizes the concept of alienation laid out in his early works, the essence of capital, its whatness, is the endless, limitless valorization of value, the endless deployment of reified value for self-augmentation through never-ending cycles of money-capital being advanced and returning bloated with a surplus. This is a sociating movement which sets itself up and asserts itself “behind the backs” of people, as Marx often puts it (hinter dem Rücken, e.g. Gr.:136, 156, MEW23:59). Valorization is the translation of German ‘Verwertung’, which can mean simply ‘use’, ‘utilization’, ‘drawing the value or benefit from something’, but in the context of Marx’s thinking it signifies above all the ‘use’ of reified value to make more reified value through the circular movement of the advance and return of capital. Valorization is the movement characterizing what capital is, whereby the movement here cannot be thought in terms of human action, but as a destiny, an historical sending as a cast of being that prevails over everything, enticing with its possibilities. To think valorization as attributed to historical destiny goes against the grain of Marxian thinking, of course, for which something destinal would have to be treated as an ahistorical fetishism which could be dissolved as a figure of “bourgeois false consciousness” by deciphering value and valorization as ostensibly a “social product just like language” (MEW23:88) that is attributable ultimately to human subjectivity.

Nevertheless, just as we shall see, when discussing Heidegger’s thinking on the set-up, that the essence of technology is nothing technical, the essence of capital is nothing economic; the valorization of value cannot be thought ultimately as an economic phenomenon but solely as an historical casting of human being and the beingness of beings within the 3D-temporal clearing for being itself. Marx’s critique of political economy is not a theory of capitalist economy with the appropriate specialized concepts; rather, as critique, it is a questioning and a presentation of the socio-ontological essence of capital which — now expressed in Heidegger’s language — is not merely a human machination. The analysis of the value-form, that has plagued and puzzled readers of the first chapter of Das Kapital ever since its first publication, is a socio-ontology of value, as the very word ‘form’ indicates, a term that goes back to Plato and Aristotle as the Latin translation of ἰδέα and μορφή, terms coined to formulate the beingness of beings, their ‘looks’ as beings.

If the valorization of value expresses the essence of capital, i.e. its whatness, then capital is gathered into the various modes of valorization. In this gathering, everything that is reveals itself to be valorizable, i.e. as capable of being drawn into a circuit of valorization, i.e. of self-augmentation of reified value. Value is neither money nor capital but the essence of valorizing, which lets all beings appear as valorizable. With the reification of value in the sociating thing, money, and the self-movement of this value-thing through transformations into commodities and production process in circuits of self-augmentation, the connection of reified value-movement with being valuable for human beings is lost, alienated. The movement is out of human hands and instead humans themselves are enticed and motivated to move by an eery power of endless augmentation of value. Whereas previously (Chapter 5.1) we have seen that the phenomenon of value is to be uncovered first of all in things and people being valuable for living, i.e. in enhancing a way of life, and exchange-value is to be understood as a derivative form of value that arises in the social practice of exchange, Marx traces an inversion of value in which it becomes a self-moving subject of its own augmentation and as such a reified social power (cf. Chapter 10.1). This is the Marxian concept of fetishism, which assumes various phenomenal ‘looks’, including commodity fetishism, money fetishism, capital fetishism, interest fetishism (cf. Chapter 6.8). The common essential trait of these fetishisms is that value has assumed a reified look remote from any human appreciation of value as value for living that initiates a movement within a topsy-turvy world of self-augmenting self-movement of reified value. “It is only the determinate social relation of humans themselves which here assumes for them the phantasmagoric form of a relation among things.” (Es ist nur das bestimmte gesellschaftliche Verhältnis der Menschen selbst, welches hier für sie die phantasmagorische Form eines Verhältnisses von Dingen annimmt. MEW23:86)

Value expresses itself quantitatively as well as qualitatively in the potential or realized exchange against money, but, despite the real appearance of reification, it cannot be identified with the thing ‘money’, for this is already an inversion. Exchange-value comes about, in the first place, in the sociating movement of estimating interplay of commodity goods. Nevertheless, once this value reification and fetishism are established (preontologically in understanding, ontologically in philosophical thought and historically in the world), the essence of capital expresses itself above all in money and money-capital’s augmenting self-movement. The capitalist world gathers itself in money; in the thing ‘money’, the world ‘worlds’ capitalistically, as soon as the movement of valorization, i.e. the augmenting deployment of all beings as values, achieves an absoluteness. The absoluteness consists in reified value no longer having any relation to how things and people’s abilities are valuable for human living. In the capitalist world, all beings have a direct or indirect relation to money; the totality of beings passes like Alice through the value-mirror, money, into an inverted world of capital valorization. The critique of capitalist economy amounts to deciphering this inversion.

If reified value is the way the totality of beings opens up and shows itself in its being, and also is kept in perpetual movement as a metabolism of value-forms, the question arises as to what the gathered gathering of valorization should be called. With this naming, the essence of modern capitalist society would also be named. Instead of tracing back value to social labour in an abstractly universal form (as Marx does, thus suggesting that a socialized human subject could re-invert the reification of value into a conscious sociation of labour according to a total social plan that would do away with reified social relations), labour itself now also has to be thought in tracing it back into its groundless ground in the never-ending movement of valorization, since labouring humans, too, are merely used by this essencing that holds sway historically as a way in which the world shapes up and manifests itself in our age. We call the gathering of valorization that attains domination in the capitalist world in an essential sense the gathering of the gainable or, simply, the gainful game (Gewinnst, Gewinn-Spiel). The gainful game as the gathering of the gainable is here neither profit nor winnings nor a purely economic magnitude, nor the successful result of a human struggle or human labour, but the open gathering of all the risky opportunities for gain through reified, estimating interplay, which holds sway groundlessly as the essence of capitalism’s truth. The gainful game offers itself to view as a world of apparent opportunity for human being whilst appropriating human being to itself. Within this gathering as a constellation of being, human beings are enticed to cast their selves into the endless, uncertain pursuit of gain as its unwitting agents.

According to Grimm: “Winnings (Gewinn) are associated with winning (attaining something through struggle, labour).” With this definition, only a human action would be addressed. The definition also takes account of the contingency — the fortune, chance, hap, luck — at play in the pursuit of winnings. The manifold of winning as the essence of capital’s sociating movement signifies more originarily and more uncannily the gathering of all modes of possible gain in which humans, too, are drawn into and are (or can be) used by the circular self-movement of valorizing value. Only from a human perspective does the gathering of the gainable appear as a goal that is achieved by struggle and labour, viz. earning a livelihood. The gathering of the gainable as a constellation of being’s disclosive truth in historical time, however, makes everything that is (exists) present itself as valorizable material. In this way, it entices and ensnares humans in grasping striving. Everything is only to the extent that gain can be had from it. Everything that does not allow itself to be drawn into the circuit of valorization, through which advanced capital can be augmented, is not (is worthless). Everything is only insofar as a capital sum can generate from it winnings as offspring. The gathering of the gainable challenges all beings — both whats and whose — to allow themselves to be drawn into the circuit of valorization and thus to contribute to the growth of capital. The gathering of the gainable thus sets all beings into motion by sucking everything a priori into the risk-taking calculus of valorization, of winning and losing.

The essence of capital (that calls for an historical, hermeneutic recasting) is thus not anything merely capitalist but rather the reified historical consummation of what Plato and Aristotle call πλεονεξία (cf. Chapter 4.1, 4.4, Chapter 6.1), the striving for more. It is neither the principal sum of money that is augmented, nor merely the ethos of a subject that is greedily or otherwise after monetary gain. It is neither money nor the lust for money, neither something objective nor subjective, but a calculating, ‘gainful’ mode of revealing the totality of beings in whose 3D-temporal clearing everything appears valuable as having the potential for winnings, so that humans are enticed by the gainful game as players and compelled to think in a thoroughly calculative, albeit risk-taking, manner that sets up everything in images and representations of potential for gain. The gainful game is a constellation of being, an historical hermeneutic cast of being, that holds sway as a way in which the totality of beings discloses itself. Since it is an historical sending, a cast of the beingness of beings, the essence of capital, cannot be tied down to any ‘thing’, even though everything that can be valorized ultimately has a relation to money, i.e. a price. Nor is capital the self-interested ‘invention’ of a social class, the ‘bourgeoisie’. Marx speaks of value as a social relation, which suggests that it is constituted by sociated humans themselves, of course, without them knowing what they are doing, i.e. unconsciously. (“They don’t know it, but they do it.” Sie wissen es nicht, aber sie tun es. MEW23:88) The concept of the gainful game, by contrast, does not aim at anything made by human subjects and a fortiori not at anything merely social, but at an historical way of disclosure of beings as beings in their totality that has always already targeted possibilities for gain and which calls forth the corresponding human re-actions and social structures, i.e. the corresponding modes of being-together in estimating interplay. The sociating of human beings accomplished by the historical socio-ontological constellation of the gainful game does not posit merely capitalist, gainful social relations among (pre-existing) human beings, but constitutes human beings themselves as competitive players, i.e. human beings’ very being is constituted by the gainful game.

In Marx, the value relation remains in the economic and social realm; it is the money-mediated social relation of commodities to each other which covers up and distorts the relations of working people to each other. Capital as a social relation mediated by things provides the economy with its ontological form and form of self-movement and also constitutes the basis upon which a superstructure is erected. The other social instances — the state, the legal forms, morality, culture, ideologies, philosophy, etc. — are supposed to be thought proceeding from this basis and in a correspondence to it. According to the (never completed) program of Historical Materialism announced by Marx, a social whole is to be thought in this way: the bourgeois social totality, that is, a structured totality of beings. Here in the present study, by contrast, an attempt is being made to take capital and the valorization of value back to something more originary, namely back to a constellation of disclosive truth in an historical age (our own) in which all beings appear as what and as who they are.

In the constellation of being called the gainful game, everything is disclosed in the light of being potentially good for bringing in winnings. All beings must have a potential use for gain, however indirect, otherwise they are worthless and do not ‘register’ in this historical cast of being. All beings appear refracted through the prism of reified value. Use for humans is not the criterion, but use for a circuit of valorization, i.e. ultimately, for the gainful game which turns endlessly within itself, throwing off winnings and gain for all the income-source owners. Even untouched nature can be and is valorized in the gainful game, not only through the exploitation of natural resources, but also, say, as a recreational value for valorizable humans, who in turn are employed by the circuit of valorization as labourers and clerks and managers. A valorization of untouched nature is even conceivable via the value-category of ground-rent whereby the Earth’s capacity to absorb pollutants such as carbon dioxide is marketed and thus valorized.169 That is, even the Earth in an untouched state, without being drawn into an exploitative capitalist production process of whatever kind, presents itself as valorizable for the gainful game.

Valorization is here no longer, as in its Marxian guise, only the augmentation of money-capital in a circuit, but is conceived more broadly as exploiting to achieve success, and as winning and gaining in general, and more especially as the earning of the four basic kinds of income by the competitive players (cf. Chapter 6.8). Such gaining and winning always has a more or less tenuous monetary aspect, i.e. it can be expressed directly or indirectly in costs, savings, profits, surpluses, asset-values, goodwill, brand-value, celebrity-value, prestige-value, political influence and suchlike. Insofar, all beings can be quantified and incorporated into calculations on the basis of which the success or failure can be measured in a universal measure of value: money. The estimating interplay among whos in esteeming each other (cf. Chapter 5.6) is thereby reified in being ‘monetized’ in some fashion. The gathering of opportunities for gain entices and ensnares humans in a competitive struggle for gain in the broadest sense, where they struggle with each other, and in this way, the gainful game valorizes and deploys human beings themselves. The value for valorization cannot be restricted directly to monetary value but indirectly covers everything that can be won from beings as gain and success. Even though certain kinds of success cannot be turned directly into cash, a connection with money-value is nevertheless maintained insofar as success appears valuable. Success can show itself simply in the form of a gain in social status and prestige, i.e. as gaining a successful stand in whoness, which can then, in turn, be deployed in the pursuit of monetary gain. The striving for gain in this case assumes the phenomenal form of vanity as a thirsting to have one’s who-status estimated highly by others, and this thirsting, in turn, sprouts also a striving to have more of those “conveniencies of life” (Adam Smith) which one ‘deserves’.

As sketched above, the value-form, i.e. the socio-ontological ‘look’ of value, analyzed by Marx can be traced back to a more originary valorization in an historical hermeneutic constellation in which the totality of beings opens up and beings show themselves a priori from the perspective of potential contribution to gain. The reason for the non-originariness of the Marxian analyses of the value-form is that they mainly tease out the contradiction between private and social, i.e. particular and universal subjectivity with the aim of relating everything back to the historical possibility of a consciously sociated universal subject that would underly the total economic process. Insofar, Marx’s thinking is situated within the subjectivist metaphysics of modernity in the particular form of Feuerbachian anthropology in which all beings in their being are traced back to humankind and in particular to ‘productions’ and ‘projections’ of the labouring human as the underlying subject. The fetish character of the value-form includes that the products of human labour have assumed an autonomy vis-à-vis human subjectivity and therefore evade its control. Subjectivity as the metaphysical environment in which Marxian thinking abides is, however, not originary, but is in turn grounded in a clearing of historical truth that decides as what the totality of beings reveals itself, without lying simply at the disposition of human actions as a ‘production’. Rather, a recasting requires our receptivity for an hermeneutic message. Marx wants to bring renegade objectivity, which is thought under the rubric of fetishism, back into a non-reifiedly, authentically sociated subjectivity, in which collectivized human beings are consciously mediated social subjects, but this by no means implies that the totality of beings would cease to reveal itself as a gathering of opportunities for gain or even that there would be a twist in such revelation.

If, therefore, to see more clearly, we must take leave of the modern metaphysics of human subjectivity in the form of labouring human being as what is, or ought to be, underlying, this leave-taking does not have implications solely for the value concept, which now can no longer be traced back ultimately to human labour as abstract value-substance. Accordingly, the value concept must now be thought without a pro-ductive relation to human labour as that which ultimately underlies, as the valuableness of beings themselves which, conceived in a more Hegelian way, is neither purely subjective nor purely objective, but rather subjective-objective.

The valorization of value cannot be traced back to a production, i.e. to a bringing-forth, by human labour in which surplus value is siphoned off, but as a bringing-about (Zeitigung) in a mutually estimating interplay of competitive struggle, i.e. a power play in which abilities of all kinds, including entrepreneurial abilities, vie for tangible, monetary, value estimation and validation. The totality of beings opens itself to us human beings as valuable, estimable — and therefore worth desiring, as desirable — in the broadest of spectrums that includes also what is worth-less, value-less, but also whos as well as whats. The whos are not subjects and the whats are not objects. Valuableness comprises not only things’ being useful (being-good-for...) in the broadest sense of being appreciated, estimated and valued, but also the value of being seen as somewho and reflected in a good light by others, being appreciated by others, in the first place, in having one’s abilities estimated, validated and rewarded through reflection in the “value-mirror” (Wertspiegel, MEW23:72). Money is the highest embodiment or crystallization of this value-being as the reified, tangible mediator in the dimension of valuableness that provides also the universal reified measure for all that is valuable. Money itself as the representative of wealth in general is the universal key to what is valuable by means of exchange and so itself becomes desirable as the focused aim of the striving for gain. The open gathering of opportunities for gain entices human beings into a striving for gain that, from another perspective, is nothing other than the reified movement of money as capital which sets all beings into motion for the sake of gain, thus becoming a circular end in itself and insofar senseless.

9.6.2The set-up

In order to assess the uncanny nature of the gainful movement set in train by fetishized sociation through reified value and put it into relation with the socio-ontology of exchange, interchange and interplayas well as the notion of the invisible hand, all of which have been developed in earlier chapters, it is helpful to draw on Heidegger’s thinking on the set-up (Gestell) as the essence of modern technology. We read in a lecture given by Heidegger in Bremen in 1949:

Das Bestellen stellt. Es fordert heraus. Das Bestellen geht jedoch, wenn wir es in seinem Wesen bedenken und nicht nach möglichen Wirkungen, keineswegs auf Beute und Gewinn, sondern immer auf Bestellbares. ‘Immer’, das sagt hier: im vorhinein, weil wesenhaft, das Bestellen wird nur deshalb von einem Herstellbaren zum folgenden fortgezogen, weil das Bestellen zum voraus alles Anwesende in die vollständige Bestellbarkeit hingerissen und dorthin gestellt hat, mag das Anwesende im Einzelfall schon besonders gestellt sein oder nicht. Diese alles überholende Gewalt des Bestellens zieht die gesonderten Akte des Bestellens nur noch hinter sich her. Die Gewalt des Bestellens läßt vermuten, daß, was hier ‘Bestellen’ genannt wird, kein bloßes menschliches Tun ist, wenngleich der Mensch zum Vollzug des Bestellens gehört.

(‘Das Ge-Stell’ GA79:29f, emphasis in the original)

Setting-up sets up by order170. It challenges. If we consider it in its essence and not according to possible effects, however, ordered setting-up does not aim at booty and gain/winnings (Gewinn), but always at what can be ordered to set up. ‘Always’ means here: a priori, because essentially, ordered setting-up is only dragged forth from one being that can be pro-duced to the next because ordered setting-up has from the outset always already torn everything present into a total availability for being set up by order and sets it up in this total availability — no matter whether in an individual case the present being may be specifically set up or not. This violent force of ordered setting-up that surpasses everything only draws the specific acts of ordered setting-up in its wake. The violent force of ordered setting-up suggests that what is called ‘ordered setting-up’ here is no mere human act, even though humans belong to the execution of ordered setting-up. (‘Das Ge-Stell’ GA79:29f, emphasis in the original)

Despite all this “violent force of ordered setting-up” that “surpasses everything”, the chain of ordered setting-up, according to Heidegger,

läuft auf nichts hinaus; denn das Bestellen stellt nichts her, was außerhalb des Stellens ein Anwesen für sich haben könnte und dürfte. Das Be-stellte ist immer schon und immer nur daraufhin gestellt, ein Anderes als seine Folge in den Erfolg zu stellen. Die Kette des Bestellens läuft auf nichts hinaus; sie geht vielmehr nur in ihren Kreisgang hinein. Nur in ihm hat das Bestellbare seinen Bestand.

(‘Das Ge-Stell’ GA79:28f)

comes to nothing, for ordered setting-up does not set up anything in presence that could have or could be allowed to have a presence for itself outside setting-up. What is ordered into the set-up is always already and always only set up in order to set up in success an other as its successor. The chain of ordered setting-up does not come to anything; rather, it only goes back into its circling. Only in this circling does what can be ordered into the set-up have its stand.

Heidegger thinks here ordered setting-up as the essence of nihilism, that comes to nothing, circling only in its “aim-lessness” (Ziel-losigkeit171) and senselessly drawing all beings into its incessant circular movement. Human beings themselves cannot be the subject of this constellation of being called the set-up because they, too, are drawn into “absolute servitude” (unbedingte Dienstschaft, XXV V&A:87), degraded to the status of mere “employee” (Angestellte) inserted into the set-up and employed as its “most important raw material” (XXVI V&A:91). The quintessential formula for Heidegger’s questioning of the modern world is the “will to will”, a formula forged from his long critical engagement with Nietzsche and the latter’s formula of the “will to power”. The ghostly absolute ‘subject’ of the ceaseless circling of the set-up is named as “the will to will”, a will that wills only “the absolute and complete securing of itself” (Wille zum Willen [...] die unbedingte und vollständige Sicherung seiner selbst, V&A:84). The will to will is thus but a ghostly presence and an enticing siren in whose presence all beings are drawn into a circular movement of setting-up for the senseless sake of setting-up. The origin of this setting-up, according to Heidegger, is the productive know-how that has its beginnings in Greek τέχνη (ποιητική) and which provides the paradigm for all Western metaphysical thinking, including its theological thinking. The ancient Greeks already thought being as having-been-produced (Hergestelltsein), as having been brought forth into standing presence, and Heidegger sees modern technology, enabled by the exact sciences that arose in the seventeenth century, in its absolute domination as the historical culmination of this metaphysical destiny.

Because of his single-minded focus on production, Herstellung, which conforms with the asserted one-dimensional constellation of being he calls the Ge-Stell, Heidegger has to assert, as quoted above, “ordered setting-up in no way aims at booty and winnings, but always at what can be ordered to set up” (‘Das Ge-Stell’ GA79:29). But how is this assertion to be squared with Marx’s insight into the essence of capital as the “restless movement of winning, gaining” (die rastlose Bewegung des Gewinnens, MEW23:168)? Heidegger remains totally blind to the phenomenon that all that is produced by the Gestell also has to estimated and validated in an interplay as value in order to be. This may seem at first sight to be an overly strong assertion.

Marx’s thinking, in contrast to Heidegger’s, focuses not only on the capitalist production process, but also on the exchange process, the interplay, through which the phenomenon of value first becomes visible in its form, its ‘look’, i.e. first comes about as such. The concept of value is the foundation of Marx’s socio-ontology of capitalism. This concept of value remains ambiguous in Marx because, on the one hand, only through exchange does the form, the ‘look’ of value itself come about (and this form or look of value must be regarded as the beingness of the exchangeable), but on the other, value is said to have a measurable quantitative substance residing in the “productive expenditure of human brain, muscle, nerve, hand, etc.” (produktive Verausgabung von menschlichem Hirn, Muskel, Nerv, Hand usw., MEW23:58) whose agglomeration produces value (and not just brings it about in the estimating interplay of exchange). Value in Marx’s thinking is thus thought ambiguously both as coming about through the mirror interplay of exchange and also, true to the age-old paradigm of productionist metaphysics, as being produced by labour expended. We have criticized this latter conception of labour-value, which forms the basis of the famous labour theory of value, in Chapter 6.3. We have also seen (Chapter 8.2) that this conception enables Marx to construct a Cartesian, ‘law-like’ type of theory of capitalist economy because, if labour is the substance of value, capital-value can be continually augmented through the extraction and reification of this substance by having labourers labour under the command of capital. Value is accordingly pro-duced, brought forth through the production process, and the exchange of produced commodities on the market is then only the realization of already produced, substantial value, including a component part of surplus value, in money.

Against Heidegger’s single-minded focus on production and the totalized, “pre-calculable” (vorausberechenbar, ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ in Vorträge und Aufsätze S. 25) bringing-forth and setting-up of all beings in the Gestell, and also against Marx’s postulation of labour as a value-substance with a standing presence that can be calculably produced in a production process through extracting this substance from living labour power, it has been shown that value is not produced, but comes about (sich zeitigt) as the ongoing outcome of an estimating interplay on the markets in which what is offered is subjected to a competitive valuation in the mirror of money. The form of value, i.e. its look, is nothing other than this social process of estimation and validation. Value is only in being seen as such by human being which is itself involved in the mirror play of exchange. The markets as a whole are an ongoing interplay of estimation and validation, and thus coming-about as valuable of all the abilities of those involved in the competitive struggle to have their abilities and efforts recognized and rewarded in a social metabolism of estimation mediated by the sociating thing, money. Value can only be thought in its being as a social concept which means, it can only be thought relatively, i.e. as a relation of estimating interplay.

Moreover, because value is a relational, ongoing outcome of a value mirror play, it can also circulate as capital. Produced products and abilities and services offered directly or indirectly to society can only become and be values through the mirror of estimation in other goods and abilities similarly offered. Because Marx, at least in his dialectical value-form analysis, locates value in the exchange process, his determination of the essence of capital as a restless movement of self-augmentation of value is closer to the phenomena as they show themselves in the market-mediated striving for gain. The goal of competitive striving, money-income, is conceived by Marx as reified value, and the incessant striving for money-income holds the capitalist economy in its characteristic restless, augmentative movement which Marx ultimately thinks through in concrete, complex, conceptual detail in the (relatively neglected) Volume II of Capital on the Circulation Process of Capital. Heidegger’s conception, by contrast, can only postulate a ghostly, god-like and therefore quasi-theological “will to will” that asserts itself in an endless bringing-forth and setting-up without being able to conceptualize how this postulated “will” as essence appears, i.e. is mediated with the phenomena of everyday life in which the mobilization of beings is apparent. The very being of what is pro-duced by the Gestell is value, and such value only comes about as an outcome, and not as a product, through the sociating interplay in which these beings are estimated and come to belong as such to sociated human being. This, too, is a possible rendering of Parmenides’ famous Fragment 3: τὸ γὰρ αὐτό νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι “Being and human being belong together.” Why? Because the estimating interplay of valuation presences in the 3D-temporal clearing as such to the human mind.

Marx’s analysis of capitalism is also able to show precisely how the striving to increase productivity through the application of all sorts of technology — the power of bringing-forth — meshes with the essence of capitalism which he formulates as the valorization of value. The connecting link is what he conceptualizes as “relative surplus value production” in Part 4 of the first volume of Das Kapital. Even when the value-substance of labour-content is purged from the value concept as untenable, the striving to augment value considered in its money-form, i.e. in its ‘money-beingness’, can nonetheless still be enhanced by producing more productively because, other things being equal, greater productivity in comparison to lower productivity is invariably ‘honoured’, estimated and valued by the market in the ongoing competition with a greater monetary reward. All that is important here is the comparative or marginal or differential perspective: greater productivity, whether it be more quantity or better quality, gives an edge over competitors. In other language, the concept of relative surplus value production says that the employment of technology is a means of enhancing the chances of gain within that constellation of being called the gainful game.

Technology is and can be employed as such a means because money-capital has the social power of developing or acquiring such technology by employing people in research processes. The power of bringing-forth is thus endlessly furthered because it intermeshes with the endless pursuit of monetary gain which, in turn, must intermesh with products being estimated and validated in the market mirror play in their being as valuable. Since Heidegger’s conception of the set-up entirely lacks socio-ontologically founded concepts of value and money, the phenomenon of the link, through the mediation of a socio-ontological concept, between the striving for gain and the striving to continually enhance productivity must remain in his thinking invisible and unfounded.

Both Heidegger and Marx, of course, diagnose the state of the world as being out of kilter. Heidegger focuses on “the mad race of technology” (das Rasende der Technik, FndT VA:39), whereas Marx damns not only class exploitation (which depends on the untenable labour theory of value), but also the uncontrollable, subjectless process of valorization of value (to be remedied — purportedly — historically through socialism and the construct of a totally socialized subject). For Heidegger, a major consequence of the unleashed technological way of thinking is the “devastation of the earth” (Verwüstung der Erde, ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik’ XXVIII Vorträge und Aufsätze S. 95).

Aber die Erde bleibt im unscheinbaren Gesetz des Möglichen geborgen, das sie ist. Der Wille hat dem Möglichen das Unmögliche als Ziel aufgezwungen. Die Machenschaft, die diesen Zwang einrichtet und in der Herrschaft hält, entspringt dem Wesen der Technik, das Wort hier identisch gesetzt mit dem Begriff der sich vollendenden Metaphysik.

(‘Überwindung der Metaphysik’ XXVIII Vorträ
ge und Aufsätze S. 95)

But the earth remains sheltered in the inconspicuous law of the possible which the Earth is. The will has forced on the possible the impossible as aim. The machination that sets up this compulsion and holds it in domination arises from the essence of technology, the word here being set identical to the concept of metaphysics in its self-consummation.

Heidegger’s diagnosis depends entirely on how he thinks Western metaphysics onto-theologically. The primary thesis, first formulated in 1922, remains to the end “being means having-been-produced”172. In the late text, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, we even read, “Even φύσις, the emergence from within itself, is a bringing-forth, is ποίησις” (Auch die φύσις, das von-sich-her Aufgehen, ist ein Her-vor-bringen, ist ποίησις. FndT VA:15) When Heidegger looks for that which could save the earth from devastation and the human essence from total absorption in calculative thinking and disclosure from being exhausted in “ordering setting-up” (Bestellen, FndT VA:38), he points therefore to something “related” because “any saving [power] must be of a higher, but at the same time related essence to that which is endangered” (alles Rettende höheren, aber zugleich verwandten Wesens sein muß wie das Gefährdete, FndT VA:38). This related something that could save is therefore, Heidegger proposes, itself a kind of ποίησις, namely “art” (Kunst, FndT VA:39). All of a sudden, Heidegger switches from his talk of τέχνη pure and simple, without qualification, to τέχνη ποίητική whose poietische character as art now becomes pertinent. But otherwise, he totally ignores τέχνη κτητική., the ‘art’ of acquiring, which involves exchange. With his concept of Gelassenheit or ‘letting-be’, Heidegger also sees the possibility of an alternative in dealing with the “mad race of technology” by stepping back from its imperious challenges. In both cases, however, he misses the possibility of the side-step into estimating interplay.

Gelassenheit could serve as a mild injunction to the siren calls of the manifold gathering of opportunities for gain that constitutes the constellation of being under capitalism and lead to a re-evaluation of what is valuable for dwelling on earth. Refusing to heed and follow without limit the enticements of the possibility of gain in favour of living well within appropriate mortal limits is an echo of Aristotle’s distinction between economics and chrematistics, as discussed in Chapter 4.1. It is an exercise of human freedom to set a limit to the pursuit of gain and, ultimately, only the free individual can say ‘Enough!’ and draw that line beyond which it refuses to participate in the hard, competitive power play of striving for gain. Such a freedom, of course, is not possible for an individual living on the edge of destitution. But even this stepping-back from the gainful game leaves out of consideration that the gainful game itself can be seen through and seen as a mutual caring-for. Namely, we have already pointed to another possibility lying at the heart of metaphysics from its beginning, a possibility which Heidegger did not see. The fixation on ποίησις and production comes from the way δύναμις (power, potential) is thought ontologically by Aristotle as being the “governing starting-point for a change in something else” (ἀρχὴ μεταβολῆς ἐν ἄλλῳ Met. Theta 1, 1046a9f). In this formula for a key ontological structure, however, there is an ambiguity residing in the term μεταβολή, which can mean both ‘change’ and ‘exchange’ or ‘interchange’. This ambiguity opened the way for us to think through in Chapter 5 a socio-ontology of exchange distinct from traditional productivist metaphysics. Μεταβολή is the fulcrum where the lever of rethinking can be placed to pivot productivist ontology into an other ontology of interchange that is, with a shift of perspective from what to who, at the same time an ontology of whoness: the other as a starting-point of its own freedom of movement. This alternative understanding of μεταβολή must be regarded as “related” in Heidegger’s sense, and within this alternative understanding, exchange and interchange must be thought as a groundless, estimating mirror interplay of powers, in contrast to production, which is the exercise of a grounded power of knowing on a passive ‘material’ to bring forth a change in something else, namely, the ‘material’, which may even be a human being. Furthermore, as shall be investigated in Chapter 10, social power in general cannot be thought as a production but — as long as it is not the exercise of brute physical violence — only through a relational process of mirroring estimation and validation in which a superior power is recognized as superior (if only as potentially physical violent) by a free human being and thus submitted to.

What is saving in this pivoting side-step from productionist metaphysics, as indicated in Chapter 9.5, is the possibility of thinking the competitive interplay of a capitalist market economy also in its ambiguous, Janus-faced possibility as an interchange of caring-for based on mutual self-interest and even on mutual satisfaction. An intensification of caring for each other in the mutual exercise of abilities of all kinds that are estimated and appreciated as valuable in the ongoing metabolism of social interchange could represent an alternative to the “devastation of the earth” that concerns not only Heidegger. The Janus-faced possibility lying dormant in the ambiguity of human interchange must be seen as a complement to the possibility Heidegger sees in the set-up:

Zwischen den epochalen Gestalten des Seins und der Verwandlung des Seins ins Ereignis steht das Ge-stell. Dieses ist gleichsam eine Zwischenstation, bietet einen doppelten Anblick, ist — so könnte man sagen — ein Januskopf. 173

Between the epochal Gestalten of being and the transformation of being into propriation stands the set-up. This is, so to speak, an intermediate station, offering a double sight, is — one could say — a Janus-head.

If the set-up (Ge-stell) as the gathering of all possibilities of bringing-forth and the gainful game (Gewinn-Spiel) as the gathering of opportunities for gain in gainful interplay are complementary constellations of a twofold way in which the world opens up for human being, which is invariably also a striving for what contributes to living well or better, including mutual esteem, estimation and validation, then the alternative to the restless pursuit of gain that resides in seeing social interchange as opportunities for caring-for, albeit under the impetus of mutual self-interest, must also be brought clearly to light as an historical possibility. Such a possibility of rethinking, of hermeneutic recasting, itself cannot be had without power struggle among those who genuinely dedicate themselves to thinking.