The Limits of the Intensive: The Retentive as its Theoretical SolutionEric Reilly (Ras)

...[politics] is about making claims and judgmentsand having the courage to do soin the absence of the objective criteria or rules that could provide certain knowledge and the guarantee that speaking in women's name will be accepted or taken up by others - Linda Zerilli

This essay will deal with the problematic of the intensive as it applies to trans-feminist politics and machinic paradigms denying or refusing a fixed or naturalized gender category for woman under patriarchal genderizing pressures and exclusionary practices. Intensiveness is a concept so popular in academic scholarship in feminism, psychoanalysis, economics, urban planning, ecology and elsewhere, however, leading many to raise the question of its redundancy. While useful in describing an accelerating rate of variable production cycles in a constant and unchanging temporal period - increasing teh relative surplus labor-time - the concept only describes this one side of a process that has another aspect often alluded to or hinted at, but usually with a less disciplined and rigorous analysis than that of its unique corrolary, antithetical development, acting as an independent phase of the first, intensive phase which together form the total process of consuming, producing, and reproducing value in self-expanding, auto-poietic valorization.

Marxian theories of market crises locate the disturbance of production in sudden fluctuations in the values of commodities produced that differ at the moment their sale must occur from its value during production. Thus, the separation of these two phases - purchase and sale - is extended to the separation of the intensive phase of production from what I term the retentive phase, when temporary barriers to the intensive phase of neoliberalisms deregulated capital flow are put up, not to block the circulation of commodities to outside markets, but rather, to store or retain an excess of value-substance, until the markets technical ensemble of economic control and regulation of the bodies of its subjects - the bodys position, distribution, operations, market preferences, credit rating, and all other gathered information for classifying bodies for their analysis and market management - neutralize the disequilibrium. Thus, there are dual teleos operating coextensively in the set of the differing procedures and policies of neoliberalism, which is destablized by this binary contradiction, at the same time that these unstable tensions within this discursive formations twin parallel conveyor belts, running in opposite directions, go into nourishing its renewed existence and vitality.

The radical notion of the flows of capital and the libidinal flows of desire travelling on the same plane of political economy helped fuse the economic and psychosexual processes that had previously been conceived as a dichotomy from which to choose the one best suited to the scale, scope, or layer of material laws under investigation (in deBeauvoirs The Second Sex, economic-historic forces are the driving force behind womens alienatoin, in Firestones Dialectic of Sex, the psychosexual is the logic of the division of the sexes, due to reproductive management, that she marks off as the first class divisions and sets out to prove is historical in its analytical, dialectical method). This radical immanence of undifferentiated substance producing a multiplicity of subjectivities and identities, capable of assuming both sameness and difference in their self-replicated and self-replicating constituent bodies, though it attempts to hide from binary formations, does not eradicate the textual contradictions of Derridas attacks, if we take Derridas transgressive method out of the written text and set it free in the province of corporeal object-ontology, where the text is still spoken/written, but within and through the bio/psychosexual/economic/social/political/Axiomatic processes narrated on the body through a process of coded inscription, we disrupt the ontological contradictions Derrida himself disavowed as the goal of his Grammatology. I afford myself this transfer from text to ontology owing to the nature of techno-capitals hyper-imperial production: through interactive and immersive media, the hypertextual interface, we program and inhabit dual ontological structures, bringing the experiences in each to the other. The undefined, incomplete body must write and read its code as the body speaks to its subject. This is, in simplest form, an immaterial text of sensation, perception, memory, and reflection. These operations encode the body with the psychotextual and the textualsomatic. These portmanteaus reflect two key features of the body as a deconstructible literary text:

1. Textual meaning is unstable. Thus, the psychotextual, which binds the code to the bodys awareness and recall of its process in reading through it in memory, is unstable because the memories of the psychic faculties of expression, desire, and language (for articulating desires and enunciating requests) are themselves fluid, changing and unstable sites of the bodys relation to itself as it narrates a self or selves in memory as it functions as mediator of its self-relation. The mirroring stage of self-recognition, which Lacan argues is the stage of self-objectificaiton, a sort of Hegelian alienation in the pre-verbal phase of expression, through the bodys identification of sexual and erogenous sites of stimulation.. This identification and circumscription of these sites of pleasure production/desire fulfillment, signifies the closing of the bodies open and inclusive phenomenological relation, marking the separating off a part of itself, in thought, as an object of its own love. This narcissist love of a part of the self as independent object has both liberating and repressive significance, which will be addressed later.

2. To find these different meanings we will refer again to the deconstruction of the body as textualsomatic. Where psychomatic processes are engendered in the mind and felt in the body, the textualsomatic is written in the body and read in the mind, reactivating the percept-sites endogenous sensory stimulations - visual, auditory, tactile, etc. - in memory, until this self-replicated process of memory leads the self to both rewrite and re-read his bodys relation to the objects of sensation it authors, reads, and critiques simultaneously.

I propose these concepts as a contribution to a growing body of techno-feminist politics of the cyborg or alien, the central subject of its investigations, analysis, and critique of patriarchal logics of essentialized identity and binary gender constructions. This synthesis of the social system of language and speech on the one hand, with the political economy of sexual desires, imaginary desires and wealth/power on the other, is an analytical methodology whicih I hope will be adequate to the non-cis-male today, whether or not the newly adopted neutral prefixes of queer or trans are attached to the only partly constituted, partly imagined female subject, in their attempts to form relationships with technological devices and systems about which I will remain descriptive, so as to clarify how existing techno-robotic production processes might be modified or overhauled to function in the service of monitoring and enhancing this constituent female subjects life, well-being, and most ambitiously its universal release from alienation. Here, alienation is the mutually reciprocal separation of body from body, self from other selves (identity A from not A and not A from A) and self from the world of its objective production. Since these separations open up vulnerable spaces of expropriation by power - particularly the heteropatriarchy of the market regime - questions of ownership immediately arise, and the category of property and labor under the neoliberal (or what I also designate as market fascism and hyper-imperial sovereignty to unite the economic formations with the political logics necessary to reproduce it). If the market regime is sovereign, than it follows that, over its territorial space it has sovereign authority. But this sovereign is neither a formal state or ruler. It is an axiomatic principle (recall that the Axiom was the last category along my ontological spectrum above). And this axiom remains the general law of capitalist production. Before we can highlight the problematic of the body and property ownership, I must first address two related political factors: one, the qualitatively different composition of a hyper-imperial paradigm of capital; and two, the specific permutation the general law of capitalist production has undergone in this new global network of neoliberal social formations. To begin with, the sovereign authority of an axiom or rule, is the negation of the beliefs, agency, will and actions of the individuals in the ruling classes of early bourgeois society in governing the twin phases of production and consumption via circulation. Nature has become completely alienated from itself: even the capitalist is subordinated to an alien will of capitals chaotic and unpredictable laws of seeming necessity, when in earlier capitalist formations these laws were enforced through violence, confiscation, that is, by the ideas of the rulers, which today are hypostatized by the very conditions of production this ideas expression created through practice. This is not to apologetically deny these violent interventions by neoliberalism, but to suggest that these events, today, occur under the will of the market in terms of the limits of its productive powers.

Similalry, patriarchy, or the privileged identity relation, Man, becomes increasingly aware of the limits of its potency, and its loosening grip on autonomous action independent of the needs of the market in absorbing the composite particles iwhich, in their circulation into the bodies that consume them, produce the greater magnitude of the exensively recombined quanta of its monopoly ownership privileges on violence, compulsory sale (i.e. dowry, prostitution, rape), sexual reproduction, and market exclusivity. We may model patriarchy as a private monopoly because one dimension of its power is to provide for some of the needs and wants of the non-male subjects, but at rates and under conditions which all who do not own patriarchal privilege must accept to survive. This monopoly has a household, local, national and global dimension. Because a globalized capitalist universal totality has subsumed labor, not only formally within the enclosed space of the workplace, but actually, by setting the massive proportons of capitals organic composition today off to bring all human activities, behaviors, and interactions into its logic of market surveillance and data collection on its individual actors, whose future actions are calculated in advanced based on past patterns and frequential models simulating all possible market outcomes before assigning an upper and lower limit to what its profit rates in its future state.

But what surveilles civil society can also communicate with through the mediating networks within which data is exchanged with data - a precursor for BitCoin currency rate fluctuations when its decentralized networks of digital distribution transfer these digital units from one overburdened circuit of exchange to one performing at only half its speed and capacity. The volatility of its price stems from having no retensive process to limit the intensive production of its fictitious value. Material capital flows across networked pathways, through valorizing points attracting high volumes of abstract wealth, attaching part of the value it passes to the innumerable other value-components it sheds and attracts as it completes its phases of exchange. Though we cannot model the whole system of global production, both because there is no external space to perceive the global space from neutrally, and because it changes and restructures to retensively neutralize all of its localized crisis and sites of anomic capital flight through the same techno-coordinated instant market feedback-response mechanisms and computerized execution of wealth transfers predicted to yield the highest rate of profit where it goes, when it goes there. As it travels across this imaginary distance through a web of non-linear pathways, the abstract value of the financial and service markets will detach some of their total value and bind to the circulating commodity, if: a) there has been an excess of fictitious capital and excess credit for which some abstract value no labor activitiy has even produced yet, must find some existing product of labor to bind to, or b)if the aggregate value-substance on the market has risen unexpectedly, and each currency unit must miniaturize itself into micro-units to maintain a proportion ratio of value-units to the value-magnitude of the social product. If intensive producton yields wealth in excess of what the market can absorb, the markets retensive processes take over, storing wealth instead of investing it, sheltering assets in overseas tax havens where they are not taxed but do not grow. The retensive counterbalances the overproduction of intensive exploitation. If an enterprise intensifies its exploitatoin by 50%, its value-magnitude will grow that much. But if, with this added value to spend, it can fire 50% of its laborers but reorganize the division of the rest in production that is 50% more efficient, it will return the same value at half the labor-cost, to retain two things that are really theh same: retain the costs that did not go to variable caipital, and retain the labor of society, which it has the most control over when it is put out of work, used as a threat leveraged against those still employed. And in the textual discourse it inscribes n the bodies of subjects, it intensively constructs accepted rules of speech and belief while the rest are retained, kept from the reader. The radical overthrow of this dominant paradigm of global capital is both a practical deconstructon of the material relations and social formation, and a creative deconstruction of exploring and inventing new worlds from the material offered by the old. Alienation is the state of labor struggling for freedom. In a world dominated by the superstitious power of abstract production, new truths, new ideas, must be invented, and the suppression of the imaginaton is deliberately excercised against its liberating possibilties. Gendering processes are the first textualsomatic experiences that power imposes its universal meaning on, because virtualized capital needs one concrete object to ensure its circulation wll eventually find an object of producton to bind to: the body, the laboring body and its powers and passions.

If rationalism is not strictly male, then a feminized rationalism must liberate itself universally by liberating bodies from nonexistence, releasing them into the world of things-in-themselves, where our connection with objects outside ourselves both gives us truth and gives truth to it. The performative feminist, in relation to truth, plays the role of the Parrhessiatic: the figure in ancient Greece designated the right and obligation to speak truth to power. Free to express those forms of language excluded to others, statesmen would consult him for honest advice. Today, the feminist must stand between civil society and the state, the literary text and philosophy, but always between boundaries, outside of which the body of the feminist can narrate a story through the liberated space for encounters, communication, performative speech and gesture, and play. The bodys awareness of itself is first glimpsed through self-pleasure, and in the sublation of this into feminism, through its intimacy access to shared knowledge, ideas, and potentials for self-determination and for technologys instrumentalism in transform living relations in communitys unburdened by needless work.

These tireless conditions of deferred production and sale, in a global marketplace dominated by abstracton, which, as Fueherbach said in the opening of his critique of Christianity, prefers the sign to the thing signified, the representation to the obect itself, turns historical science back into its theological form, and turns labor into a market investment, wages into indvidual capital, and savings into dividends. Labor transforms into a business in this immaterial space, and the laborer becomes the idea and the imagined of the subject without any objects outside of it to have or be had with that Marx invokes to illustrate Hegels objectification of Thought. However, this critique of Hegels phenomenology may be read as a prescient anticipation of capitalist production which, if it has not mobilized the workers to against the conditions of destruction embedded in its productivist logic, will still be submitted to the positive aspect of the dialectic as it transforms the global form of social producton into its negative. If this transformation of the working class into the negation of private property, and therefore itself as a class, is not achieved, the positive aspect of the dialectic will instead transform the material form of production into its negation in immaterial conditions of production. Hegels idealism thus becomes the negation of materialism as the substance of historical motion, which the reign of Mind appropriates in contemplation of itself, into an object of thought, without existence, frozen in eternity. No longer is alienation that from the means of production, but from the onto-genetic conditions to which their development must be traced, but which can be traced there no longer, because it has been replaced by this repetition of sameness. Difference - which Derrida pairs with deference to show that the latent nihilism of his non-explanatory methods refusal of absolute meaning, can find an existential answer within the irriuptions of the text as it is stretched to its limits. The polyvocal interpretations of a line of text are the literary-philosophical equivalent of the polyvalence of series of commodity exchanges in the ontology of flexible, global markets. But the commodity is but the mere image of the living bodys interaction with the material world in production, and soon the living being experiences a reified self-relation in which it recognizes its whole life and existence in its accumulated objects. They are set to be consumed, and so is the body of the laborer who produced them, for the body is a commodity itself, with a price tag attached to its surface after passing through its many determinant phases in production. None of these phases are what the body is, but separate phases of realized states of its possible manifestations. Commodities must obey laws, however, and those possible manifestations of the body that have no use to capital are excluded from thought, limited by the productive forces, whose size and capacity too appear unchangeable - retained as a stored surplus - under alien laws of accumulation that repress other possible configurations for it and the bodys relation to these possible configurations.

Marx rejected all utopianism, but at a time when capital had not become the sovereign of the ma imperial market, the contemporary model of the ancien regime, a self-immanent in imperium The sovereign axiom had from the beginning burrowed into the capitalist order, in the commodity itself, whose sovereignty of abstract value would dominate its exchange, over and above the material needs of society. It was the arbitrary ruler over all human relations, changing them each time it reproduced them through a process of sameness, of repetition of an event, that the most sensitive oscillations of the contingencies of the market can turn into difference, as the repeated process sets out on a new trajectory. The genderless, propertyless (and the first form of human property is the body), monetized prisoners of universal alienation must adopt the critical and creative epistemological style of deconstruction, which poses different interpretations to all partial truths offered by a society governed by a fictitious demiurge. All received truths should be dismissed as fanciful delusions of idealism, or the intervention of the evil designs of the demiurge of commodity production, whose will masquerades as the universal will, forging all concrete existence into a mirage of itself, a world without any objective, sensual substance not yet wastefully consumed, but whose abstract forms, their empty possibilities haunt us from the past in the future, when the rule of bourgeois reason has reduced time to exchangeable, identical units of currency. It is no difference whether value creates a material object at the regressive termination of this sequence of signs deferring to each successive sign. All that is produced is the body and its determinate desires, and all production becomes is infiinite circulation, of desiring bodies, bodies producing desires, producing more bodies, producing the same deferred desires indefinitely. These sequences of signs forbid other interpretations of their ordering and syntax from emerging at the corners of the market, and here the techno-feminist project of emancipation and abolition of the rigid gendered and genderizing meanings could begin to reveal new interpretations. The feminist must be interposes not between literature and philosophy, but between sexualitiy and politics, where the body and the state find their relation to each other in the relation of civil society to political society, the state. The selves that have not yet become, that have not yet realized - to play with Marxs species-being - their sexual-being create a space at this interstice to actualize it in all its possible determinations.

Though rationalism embraced by the victims of patriarchys rational reproduction, it must embrace those other faculties of the mind suppressed by patriarchal hierarchies subordinating all other cogno-affective experiences to the sovereignty of reason: it must use its faculties of creativity and contemplation, imagination and reflection, to find its own myths and fables of its experience, transforming the material it apprehends into allegories, metaphors, and fantasies into which reason may go to find something concrete to imagine and associate with its concepts. The aesthetic is the mediator of reason and morality, while capital had duped subjects and rulers alike that the reasoning principle, the axiom of the commodity, was the highest form of thought. But thought only fulfills its potential faculties in all directions when it has an instant output of its choices on technological interfaces, to which the user can trace the decision to the initial beliefs, desires, and intentions, then modelling these modalities as separate categories of propositions on a computational logic tree. Though reflecting on itself, or contemplating its own existence, is the closed, circular logic Marx insisted, but new technologies open this circle and widen its circumference at exponential scales of growth. A liberated society is one whose members cooperate in mutual self-determination and collective sharing of all technical procedures and acess to technological systems of enhancement. Its intensive development, free from the authority of the rational principle, takes rational pleasure in intensive growth and growing into its gender, its relation to social reproduction, to self, and to its interpretive performances uncovered meanings.