Contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly metaphysical. The paper contrasts a ‘physical’ capitalism – of the national and manufacturing age – with a ‘metaphysical capitalism’ of the global information society. It describes physical capitalism in terms of 1) extensity, 2) equivalence, 3) equilibrium and 4) the phenomenal, which stands in contrast to metaphysical capitalism’s 1) intensity, 2) inequivalence (or difference), 3) disequilibrium and 4) the noumenal. Most centrally: if use-value or the gift in pre-capitalist society is grounded in concrete inequivalence, and exchange-value in physical capitalism presumes abstract equivalence, then value in contemporary society presumes abstract inequivalence. The paper argues that the predominantly physical causation of the earlier epoch is being superseded by a more metaphysical causation. This is discussed in terms of the four Aristotelian causes. Thus there is a shift in efficient cause from abstract homogenous labour to abstract heterogeneous life. Material cause changes from the commodity’s units of equivalence to consist of informational units of inequivalence. Formal cause takes place through the preservation of form as a disequilibriate system through operations of closure. These operations are at the same time information interchanges with a form’s environment. Final (and first) cause becomes the deep-structural generation of information from a compressed virtual substrate. This may have implications for method in the social and human sciences. The paper illustrates this shift with a brief discussion of global finance.

Introduction: Physics and Metaphysics
Capitalism would on the face of it be seen as integrally physical, integrally material. Indeed Marxism - which analyses and in practice is to supersede capitalism - is known as dialectical materialism or historical materialism. Commodities are physical. The logic of the commodity, of the cause and effect of economic structure on superstructure is modelled on and consistent with Newtonian physics. The mechanism of capitalism, the supply and demand, the ubiquitous exchange, is already understood in Renaissance and very early modern Galilean physics. The capitalist commodity is abstract and homogenous: it is interchangeable with a number of different concrete goods, again very much on the model of the atom in physics. The Karl Marx of Capital, of Das Kapital, thought the laws of capitalism as akin to the laws of the physical and natural sciences: hence Marx’s praise for Darwin’s Origin of Species in Capital (vol. 1, pp. 342,372). Indeed Capital’s capitalism is like a great machine, in which at stake is the reproduction of the total social capital. This is a machine in which the physicality of the means of production engages with the physicality of labour to produce a physical product. Capital in this sense is used in a way that is physical. Capital itself is indeed a ‘social relation’, a social relation that works through the abstraction of the commodity and of labour power. In a Newtonian vein, Marx’s labour theory of value understands capital to be comprised of congealed, homogenous abstract labour time. Yet the commodity and exchange are constituted in the field of the physical. The physical in Newtonian mechanics is abstract, homogenous and quantitative. There is thus an abstract physicality in Newtonian physics and indeed in Newton’s calculus that fully filters through the nature of capitalism. Indeed it is in perhaps such a sense that we might understand technology as ‘second nature’.

If capitalism and the economy are physical then where does this leave that residue of the physical, or better that which transcends the physical, i.e. the metaphysical. How does capitalism stand in relation to metaphysics? For Antonio Gramsci (1973) the superstructure is metaphysical. Gramsci contrasts the infrastructure, the economic infrastructure, which works like a physical mechanism, like a mechanical body with the Geist, the mind, the spirit of the superstructures. Indeed ‘hegemony’, which is superstructural is essentially metaphysical. Yet with the determination of the economy, and the subordination of superstructures to economic reproduction, the metaphysicality of the superstructures is relegated to a mere function, and functionality, in which functional prerequisites are interchangeable, Though not reducible to Newtonian mechanical causality, these relations still foreground capitalism as physical. What I want to argue in this paper is that that the entire operation of capitalism, including the economic infrastructure is becoming metaphysical. Indeed that if in the national industrial age the principle of the physical was driver of the sphere of the metaphysical, that now the metaphysical principle infects the material base itself and is determinate in regard to the physical.

Let me give some idea of what I mean by metaphysics. Max Weber has pointed to a metaphysical, or religio-metaphysical era prier to modernity. In this, in the world religions – Judaism, Taoism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism –, spirit moves into a transcendental relation to nature. Nature becomes more or less mechanical, while spirit moves into a transcendental sphere. It is now that metaphysics emerges. In the West we receive metaphysics through inter alia the Platonic idea, Aristotelian substantial forms and Thomist theology. But it is there equally in ‘Eastern’ religions. Thus Yukio Mishima (1999) in The Temple of Dawn describes Buddhism at great length according to principles, for example of the monadological immortality of the soul, as a cultural formation that is and in a recognisably metaphysical. The world religions, beginning from millennia before Christ through about the Renaissance, mark the dominance of the metaphysical. The Renaissance – and Galileo, Descartes and Hobbes alongside Renaissance perspective in art and architecture – signal the rise of the physical: this of course in a sort of quiet alliance with the Reformation and its protestant ethic. The physical then would comprise Newtonian clock-time, Cartesian extension and Renaissance perspective. It embraces metric time and metric space (Delanda 2001). Such an age of the physical very consciously defines itself in contrast to Aristotelian, Platonic and indeed Christian metaphysics.

Bruno Latour (1995) has written that we sociologists must ‘dare to be metaphysical’. Latour’s statement can be understood in the context of his book We Have Never Been Modern (1993). Latour says that the modern radical separation of subject and object is a useful myth. He objects to the radically ‘physical’ nature of the object, and say that instead we inhabit a world of quasi-subjects and quasi-objects. Hence Latour’s objects are not strictly physical but already partly metaphysical. For Latour subjects and objects always were quasi-subjects and quasi-objects. Hence there never was in fact a radical subject-object separation. And we were never modern. To never have been modern is at the same time always to have been metaphysical. Thus for Latour to say that we must dare to be metaphysical is for him to say that we must dare to be as we always were. Unlike Latour, I am not arguing normatively for metaphysics in this paper. And I am not saying that we should dare to be metaphysical. I am arguing from a social change standpoint. I am suggesting that we once were predominantly physical, and now in fact we are increasingly metaphysical. I am trying to point to ways in which we, and today’s capitalism, are metaphysical .

For present purposes the clearest contrast of the metaphysical and physical, comes via the work of Kant. Perhaps the classic English language text on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is entitled Kant’s Critique of Metaphysics (Walsh 1975). Kant wrote his three critiques late in his life. Kant’s ‘critical period’ is a break with his earlier work, that is, with his metaphysical period. Kant’s major influence before his critical period is Leibniz and implicitly Spinoza. The classical sociologist Georg Simmel used Kant to work through his own juxtaposition of the physical and the metaphysical. For Simmel (1995), critical Kant epitomised the physical while Goethe and Nietzsche were the flag-bearers for metaphysics. For Simmel and for us the stakes are high. And this is because such a new metaphysics entails not just anti-positivism, but a break with critique itself. Pre-critical Kant is author of the Physical Monadology in which he uses the metaphysical principles of Leibniz to try to rethink physics. Simmel wrote his PhD thesis on this. In the thesis Simmel rejects the early Kant’s metaphysics for a more positivist, indeed Spencerian, viewpoint. The middle and late Simmel by contrast is increasingly metaphysical. In other words, Simmel’s early positivist and thus ‘physical’ work criticized early Kantian metaphysics. While Simmel’s middle and late, metaphysical, work is addressed against Kant’s later physical period. The later Kant gives a physicalist account of knowledge in science and mathematics. He preserves a space for metaphysics in ethics and art. The metaphysical is also Kant’s realm famously of freedom, God, infinity and the thing-in-itself. There are then two types of Kantian reason: the physical reason or empirical reason of the understanding (Verstand), and, on the other the metaphysical reason that Kant calls Vernunft, or Reason itself. For Kant metaphysical reason is the condition of possibility of physical reason. Yet it is physical or empirical reason that takes pride of place. The late Simmel is explicitly metaphysical, pitting his Lebensphilosophie, and the principle of life against the mechanical assumptions of the physical. Indeed Simmel’s (1999) classic late vitalist book Lebensanschauungen is subtitled Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Four Metaphysical Chapters).

FOUR CONTRASTS
We can understand this juxtaposition of physical and metaphysical in terms of four contrasts. The physical assumes extension, equivalence, equilibrium and the phenomenon, while the metaphysical assumes intensity, inequivalence, disequilibrium and the noumenon.

1) extensity versus intensity
For Descartes’ there are two substances: res extensa and res cogitans. Res extensa is conceived as mechanism and is physical substance. Res cogitans is thinking substance. Res cogitans is thinking substance. It is self-organising and thus reflexive: it possesses its own intensive energy. But this sort of self-organising substance is also found in animals, even in plants and inorganic matter. Indeed Aristotle ascribed differing levels of ‘teleology’ – as distinct from external causality - to animals man and the gods. Because it is a property also of nonhumans it makes sense to contrast extensive substance with, not thinking, but instead intensive substance: to speak of not res cogitans but instead res intensiva. If substance works analogously to mind, on a sort of model of mind, then we can call it intensive. Indeed classical sociologist Gabriel Tarde thought of society on this sort of intensive model. (Tarde 1999)

If intensive substances are involved in self-causation, then extensive substances are subject to external causation. If intensive substance like the cogito is indivisible, then extensive substances are divisible. They are typically divisible into parts that are identical with one other. Intensive substances are all different from each other. For some thinkers extensive substances can be broken down into parts so small that they are no longer divisible. These parts are atoms. Although Cartesian res extensa is our model for extensity, Descartes, was not an atomist. Instead he thought that extensive substance was infinitely divisible. Democritus, Lucretius and many modern thinkers are atomists. Atoms of any substance are identical to one another, such as hydrogen or oxygen atoms in chemistry. Though Descartes was not an atomist, his notion of extensity shared with atomists the core assumption, not of difference but identity. This is that even infinitely divisible substance, is divided into parts that are identical with one another. Extensity in this sense works from a principle of identity. Extensity is metric. Extensities are measurable. They are measurable through interchangeable units. Such units can be spatial or temporal. Every intensity on the other hand is different from every other. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1991) monads are such intensities. If atoms are consistent with the assumptions of Cartesian extensity or mechanism, then monads are consistent with the Cartesian cogito. Only at stake is not the cogito but an infinity of singular cogitos, all different from one another. This multiplicity of cogitos, of intensive substances may inhabit human bodies, they may inhabit organic or inorganic bodies, or they may, like for Gabriel Tarde, inhabit social bodies. But each is different from every other and each is in some sense of the word intelligent, each embodies some sort of reason. Descartes gives us an ontological dualism of two substances and Spinoza a single-substance or immanentist ontology. Leibniz for his part is neither a monist nor a dualist: he gives us an infinity of substances, in which every substance is different from every other. This is a basis of what today is called the ontology of difference (Deleuze 1968: 286-7).

2) equivalence versus inequivalence (difference)
Atomism means that things are equivalents, somehow homogenous. There may be many different types of atom. In chemistry we can speak of more than 100 different types of atoms, with different qualities and different extension. But each atom of a given kind, say oxygen, is equivalent to every other atom of that kind. Here each element is a sort of ‘species’ and every individual (atom) in that species is identical or equivalent to every other. The commodity presumes that there is only one type of atom. That is in chemistry the Periodic Table is a sort of ‘genus’ under which we have more than 100 elements as species, and every individual under each of these is identical to every other one. In Hobbesian political philosophy this is reduced to one type of atom. There is a state, and as far as the state is concerned every individual is equivalent to every other individual. Galileo’s influence on Hobbes (as Leo Strauss (1953) noted) is well known. Thus the Hobbesian state is dealing with a world of collisions of atoms, those atoms being the subjects of the state. The Hobbesian political being is later, in its assumptions of identity, Rousseau’s citizen and the Marx’s proletarian. All are atoms, a homogenous mass under the principle of identity. Hence they were in a class, whether bourgeois or proletarian: they were atoms in a class. This is also the logic of classification: the logic of genus and species. Both class and classification, and there can be no class without classification, partake of the logic of atomism, the logic of the physical. That is once we start classifying individuals as species, as identical subject-citizens of the state, we are dealing with extensity, with equivalence and the physical. Thus in an earlier physical capitalism there is a logic of the atom, a political logic of the atom. This is a logic of equivalence, in which one atom, one citizen, one proletarian is qua citizen, qua proletarian identical to any other. Metaphysical capitalism, today’s metaphysical capitalism eschews this logic of political identity. It breaks with political identity for a politics of difference. This is what Hardt and Negri (2000) describe in Empire as the politics of the ‘multitudes’. The multitudes are collectives of inequivalences, not of species-beings, but instead of individual becomings.

Marx’s commodity has a ‘two-fold nature’. Insofar as the commodity comprises use-value it does not comprise equivalents. This is because every use-value is different from every other. Like Mauss’s gift, things comprising use-value are inequivalents. They are concrete inequivalents. They do not comprise units of anything because their value is indivisible. It is not even that they comprise inequivalent bits. They comprise no bits at all. For the moment we are concerned with commodities only insofar as they have to do with equivalence. Commodities comprise equivalent units of exchange-value. Commodities are abstract and quantitative as distinct from concrete and qualitative use-values. Commodities are not exchange-values. They comprise exchange-value. These are units of value, each equivalent to every other. The commodities themselves are not identical to one another. They vary, however, only in quantity: in terms of the number of identical units of exchange-value that they comprise.

In the physical, equivalents are either identical units of measurement, such as metric time, metric space or exchange-value (money). Or they are identical units of being, such as atoms. These equivalents stand with respect to one another in relations of collision, (external) cause and exchange. Thus Galileo spoke of nature, spiritless nature as a space not just of collisions but of ‘exchanges (Serres 1968: 305-06). When the chaos of collisions begins to form patterns, what develop are the laws of cause and effect. These laws of cause and effect put a sort of order on the chaos of collisions previously characterising nature. Hobbes spoke of his war of all against all in literally the Galilean language of collisions. For him another type of order must be put on the chaos of collisions and exchanges. This is law and the state: it is normative regulation through law and the state (and later – as we sociologists are so familiar with - the institutions of society). A third space of collisions and exchanges is the economy. Yet whether it is collisions, or exchanges or politics or economics or science (and science is the guiding light) or even art and architecture, it is equivalents or atoms that are colliding, exchanging, and coming under laws. The third type of chaos, of exchanges, is brought under regulation by the hidden hand of the market. Random exchanges, where A takes the place of B and B takes the place of A, are regularised, and come under law. Physics starts with random exchanges of atoms: economics continues with exchange of goods and services.

In physical capitalism, whether in politics, economics, science, law or social institutions, equivalents or atoms come under law. This is the essence of physical capitalism. Physical capitalism in all cases is about law and equivalents. Both dominance and resistance in physical capitalism is about equivalence, law and equivalence. As we saw, Rousseau’s people and Marx’s proletariat are resistant collectives of equivalence. At stake in metaphysical capitalism are neither concrete inequivalence as in use-value or the gift, nor abstract equivalence such as in exchange-value, but instead abstract inequivalence. If the commodity comprises quantities of equivalence then the commodity-fetish comprises abstract inequivalence. Marx and also Baudelaire and Benjamin likened the commodity-fetish to the phantasmagoria, to the dream. Unlike the concrete use-value the fetish, like the dream is abstract and intangible. Unlike the identity comprising the commodity, every fantasy, every dream is different to every other. In the contemporary economy, project-networks and other forms of flexible production make one-offs, make things that thus are inequivalent to one another. The labour time that goes into them is also abstract unlike that of the use-value. But it is the overlapping, non-metric time of the research and development laboratory or the studio, and hence comprises durations of inequivalence. In consumption, Colin Campbell (1987) very rightly likened the phantasmagoria of consumer culture, to a ‘romantic ethic’. The Protestant Ethic promotes a controlled metric time of equivalence. In contrast, the romantic ethic - and its critique of such instrumentalism - presumes a logic of difference. Campbell’s romantic consumerism presumes an inequivalent temporality of consumption, that each product must be different from every other and that each consumer is different for every other. This at the same time is the distinction between physical capitalism’s interchangeable possessive individual and metaphysical capitalism’s individualism of difference, whose roots are much more in romanticism. Compare also the physical capitalist commodity with the metaphysical brand. Brands also operate in a sea of inequivalence. A brands product lines may be tangible, but the brand itself is not. It is abstract. Yet every brand is different to every other. The exchange-value of a commodity is comprised of units of identity. If a brand is not different from another it has no (brand) value. The commodity is divisible into parts consisting of quantities of exchange-value. A brand is not divisible without changing into something else.

3) equilibrium versus disequilibrium.
Classical physics presumes that systems are in equilibrium states. Temporality is reversible. Newtonian time is ‘clockwork’ not just because it is abstract time, consisting of one tick followed by another at equal intervals . It is clockwork time also because if you wind it backwards or forwards you come back to the same point. The same is true of any equilibrium system. The presumption is that perturbations are noise or accident and that the system will return to equilibrium. In neo-classical economics markets are presumed to return to states of equilibrium. There may be disturbances, but equilibrium is the rule. Thermodynamics on the contrary presumes far from equilibrium systems and irreversible time. It presumes systems with entropic properties recombining subsequently at higher levels of order and complexity. One of the founders of complexity theory, Ilya Prgogine, was fundamentally influenced by the metaphsycis of Henri Bergson. When self-organization takes place, systems are chronically at disequilibrium. When something akin to intelligence, or at least reflexivity, is built into inorganic matter it too becomes metaphysical. What which is doing the self-organizing is a system’s own trace. Its trace for Varela et al (1997: 204-06 ) is the history of its structural couplings with its environment. The self that is doing the self-organizing is this trace of irreversible time and of difference. Every trace, or every history of structural coupling, is different to every other. Once markets are embedded even if they are embedded in global flows (see below) temporality becomes irreversible and the markets themselves as systems move into in disequilibrium. Sociology too has moved from ‘physical’ models of equilibrium to ‘metaphysical’ disequilibrium. For example Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) model of simple reproduction presumes equilibrium as does Talcott Parsons’s (1955) linear social systems. Even when the later Parsons (1971) takes on cybernetic concepts, they are there only to return the system to equilibrium. In this the system senses perturbations in its environment through feedback loops nullifies them to steer the system back to equilibrium. In analysts like Ulrich Beck or Niklas Luhmann, we find disequilibrium. In Beck’s ‘reflexive modernization’, reflexivity is the self-organizing moment between cause and effect. Reflexivity does not cybernetically – through sensing and regulating devices - regularise perturbations. Instead reflexivity itself – even when it attempts to move to equilibrium – instead gives rise to perturbations or unintended consequences that chronically move the system towards disequilibrium. Luhmann draws on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela for his disequilibriate autopoeisis. Here every structural coupling brings in information from the exterior. Perturbation becomes information. Noise becomes information when it makes a difference to the system. Such disequilibriate systems have the best chance of survival. This is because they unlike earlier cybernetic systems are open to their environment. They are also open to the extent that they self-organise. This self-organization is through a self that is the history of such information-receiving couplings. When system A couples with system B, the state of system B is communicated as information for system A, and vice versa. Each of these couplings is an ‘operation’. And in order for a system to couple or even exist it must be operationally closed.

4) the phenomenal and the noumenal
Metaphysics, from Plato onwards has been about the ‘in-itself’. ‘Physics’ in contrast is about the ‘for-itself’, or the for-us. Metaphysics has been about the noumenon, physics about the phenomenon. Things, for Kant, are both physical and metaphysical. As physical they are for themselves or for us. As physical we know them via the concepts of the understanding. The thing as metaphysical is noumenal: it is the thing-in-itself . We cannot know these through the concepts of the understanding. The thing-for-itself is a species, it is an atom; it stands in a relation of equivalence to other things. Reason – in the form of the concepts of the understanding comes to it from the outside as a sort of light-on the thing, as universal to particular, as genus to species . In the noumenon, the thing-in-itself Reason is in the form. Literally the Ideas of reason come from inside the thing-itself. The thing-in-itself is not the species but the individual, the singularity. Reason suffuses the thing-for-itself. Reason infuses the thing. Hence knowing - as Deleuze (1968:324) in Différence et Répétition suggests - in the one case is a matter of ‘explication’, in the second a matter of ‘implication’ . The idea comes from inside the thing-in-itself. The idea is that bit of the thing that is like mind. It is the thing’s particular ontological structure. This structure, in Leibniz’s metaphysics, is the world of that individual thing. It is the world of that thing as a set of relations, and as series of relations. The in-itself is thus as Leibniz said - and Kant knew - the sufficient reason of the thing.

The thing, the object, the good, the service in metaphysical capitalism is an in-itself. The twofold nature of Kant’s thing is replicated in the two-fold nature of Marx’s thing, the commodity. Use-value’s concrete inequivalence is in important respects noumenal and hence metaphysical. While exchange-value’s abstract equivalence, like the thing-for-itself. is physical. In the metaphysical capitalism’s abstract inequivalence there seems to be an effective fusion of noumenon and phenomenon. The noumenon, previously transcendental, somehow becomes empirical. The idea is no longer exterior to but interior to production, infusing production. As research becomes research and development, the idea no longer explicates. It implicates. It is implicit in production. It is for example implicit in the product as part of a brand. Property becomes intellectual property. Leibniz’s transcendental monad becomes Varela’s empirical system. Leibniz’s immaterial trace becomes Varela’s material history of structural coupling. Ontological difference disappears, between noumenon and phenomenon, between phenomenal base and noumenal superstructure. The idea enters the base at the very heart of the commodity. And the commodity is bent or curved as it were to become something else. That something else is a singularity, but not the sort of concrete singularity at stake in use-value. It is more like a neo-commodity. Such abstract singularity takes on life and is a virtual in its own self-transmogrification. The classical and physical commodity is in Bergson’s sense - who contrasts the virtual and the actual – an actual. The neo-commodity is itself a virtual, with a whole range of possible actualizations. Only some of these will be actualised. The neo-commodity is an informational genotype acting out an algorithm of mutations, only some of which will structurally couple with an environment. Only a few of which will attain the status of phenotype (Dover 2001). Hence there may literally be an economy of virtuals in today’s virtual society.

CAUSATION AND METAPHYSICS
According to Aristotle a thing has four types of cause: efficient cause, material cause, formal cause and final (teleological) cause. Material cause is how something is determined by what it is made of – say, flesh and blood, wood, clay – man is made of earth for example in Genesis. A being that determines another being by acting upon it is its efficient cause. Final or teleological cause has to do with the purpose of a thing that is caused. This can be a proximate purpose or an ultimate and divine purpose. And formal cause is the extent to which an individual is caused by its form. Let us underscore, Aristotle in The Physics was he was concerned not with how a form or phenotype or species was caused but how an individual was caused. And one of the causes was the individual’s form or phenotype itself. For example consider a chocolate, iced, birthday cake with my son Joey’s name on it with a Manchester United Football Club insignia, and his age inscribed in icing on the uniform on the cake. This individual cake baked by my daughter, Molly for my son on 3 Feb 2005. What is to be explained by all the causes is this very singular cake. Here the efficient cause is Molly, the cake maker. The material cause is the ingredients in the cake. The formal cause is the species cake or birthday cake. In this, Joey’s fourteenth birthday cake, baked by Molly - i.e. this individual cake - was caused by its form: its cakeness. Like the formal cause of this journal paper submission, is journal paper. The final or teleological cause is Joey’s birthday. Like in The Physics where Aristotle’s final or teleological cause of walking, drugs and surgical instruments is health.

Efficient Cause
Efficient cause is the closest to modern physical and mechanistic causation. Aristotle’s examples are the sculptor making the statue and the father causing the son. So we see that efficient cause is external to the thing caused. It is true that of the four types of causes it is only efficient cause that contains a dimension of creativity and even energy in the sense of ‘puissance’ or potentia in Spinoza’s sense . Hence the cause of Hamlet by the genius Shakespeare would be efficient cause. This is creation in the German sense of schöpfen: whether creation by God (gods) or creation in the arts. In this sense ‘first cause’ – whether in Spinoza’s or Goethe’s metaphysics would have more in common with efficient cause than with final cause. Final cause would be the extent to which a being was determined by its furthering the ultimate glory of God: where the purpose would be God’s glory. Nonetheless I will address first cause below under final cause. That is because it is causation by an ultimate being or ultimate force. The creation of the individual by the efficient cause of the poet, the father, or God is metaphysical. Walter Benjamin (1977) underscores this in his classical essay on the language of man. At stake is the cause of the concrete individual. In the age of physical capitalism what is cause becomes much more generic. It might be the species as in Darwin. It might be a state for the whole of a population, such as occupational outcome in the sociology of stratification. It might be a universal property of all physical beings in for example force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration.

In Marx’s analysis of physical capitalism, efficient cause is labour. Marx is interested in the causes of the being or thing that is central to capitalism: the commodity. The commodity is that abstract physical thing – the matter - at the heart of dialectical materialism. The efficient cause of the commodity is labour. What sort of labour is at stake here? It is not labour-power or (Arbeitsvermögen) the capacity to labour, because labour-power does not go into the commodity. Labour-power has to do with needs of the capitalist on the market. Thus it comes under teleological cause. Now Aristotle’s efficient-cause sculptor is involved in concrete labour. He is making a particular thing. The commodity is an abstract thing. Marx’s labourer is the efficient cause of the commodity. His labour is thus not concrete but abstract. Because the commodity is an abstract thing it comprises, not concrete and heterogeneous, but abstract and homogenous labour. One commodity is distinguished from another by the amount of abstract labour it comprises and the price at which it exchanges on the market. But Marx’s theory is the labour theory of value, and what counts here is labour and not exchange. Marx’s commodity is comprised of units of labour-time: of ‘abstract homogenous labour time’. Homogeneous in that every unit is like every other: like atomism in physics. In contrast Aristotle’s sculptor works in concrete, heterogeneous labour-time. The concrete labour process, which has the temporality of Aristotle’s sculptor, is indivisible. The commodity and its efficient cause are divisible. Marx, as Ricardo before him, looks at what is previously in Aristotle a metaphysical process of the creation of the individual thing and transforms it via the categories of physics. Or more precisely capitalism itself transforms and indeed reduces the metaphysical into the merely physical.

If efficient cause of products before commodification is concrete, heterogeneous labour time, and in physical capitalism abstract homogenous labour time, then in metaphysical capitalism labour time stays abstract but becomes heterogeneous (Alliez (1996), Osborne (1995)). This is briefly addressed under inequivalence above. The labour time of the sculptor or craftsman is qualitative. Physical capitalism’s labour-time is metric, hence extensive, and is quantified. It consists of quantitative extensity. Metaphysical capitalism’s labour time is also quantitative. Yet it is not metric. It is indivisible. It is not extensive, but instead intensive. Deleuze would understand it in terms of ‘quantitative intensity’. Work in informational capitalism is vectoral, the fractal or other non-metric quantities. It is quantitative, yet indivisible. Benjamin and many others have seen number very much as at the heart of metaphysics. If Euclidean geometry is quantitative and extensive, then number is quantitative and intensive. Hence we can contrast physical quantity with metaphysical quantity. More empirically, in work situations risk calculations and information archives make the future and the past les separable from the present than they were in the metric time of physical capitalism. Finally much of work in the new capitalism takes place in projects and project-networks: here work-time is regulated by the project itself, whilst making metronomic time-clock of EP Thompson’s (2001) classical capitalism increasingly irrelevant. So labour-time in metaphysical capitalism is quantitative, but it is not metric (see Delanda 2001). Finally efficient cause in metaphysical capitalism is heterogeneous in that it is also the labour time of nonhumans: value generation by quantitative intensities such as genetic algorithms and the mathematical functions of financial instruments.

Material Cause
What is material cause in physical capitalism? Indeed what is matter? We need to take only one step from efficient cause. Matter is ‘congealed abstract homogenous labour time’. It is only now that the commodity has value. This is the ‘labour-value’ that goes into it. It is different from use-value and exchange-value, both which have to do with purpose and come under teleology. So once constituted through efficient cause, material cause is what drives dialectical materialism, which is physical capitalism. Around itself it constitutes the base, which then causes the superstructures. This labour-value is the ‘value-substance’ of the commodity, what Marx (1973) called Wertsubstanz in the Grundriße. This value substance - and for Marx substance and matter are the same - is at the heart of the commodity form. Substance - or matter - here cause form. The value-form or commodity is quantified through exchange-value. Exchange-value is a question of function rather than structure. It is not internal to the commodity, which is structurally generated by its substance, by its value-substance. Exchange-value has to do with need and
Purpose: it is confirmed exterior to the commodity by the demand and supply of it. It has to do with the commodity-form’s environment. Exchange-value is determined through teleological or functional causation. But the commodity form is at the same time structurally caused through the congealed labour-time of value substance. Material cause is structural cause. This is also structure that is causing form. This matter or structure is also the cause of the superstructures, the ideological and political forms. These are not to be explained functionally. These forms are not the conditions of existence of the material base. At stake is structural causation. Material base and superstructure. Bau and Uberbau. Bau has to do with building, with load-bearing functions: The Bau must support the Uberbau. Structure in architecture means literally load-bearing qualities. In architecture form is supported by structures. Structure has to do with engineering. The Bau is as much the building-ness as the building. To the extent that superstructures such as ideology, art or politics are ‘relatively autonomous’ they follow their own formal cause. Formal cause is from the species or genre or also essence of the class, the form it belongs to. This is also a question of values. Thus we can speak of aesthetic value or filmic value or production values in advertising. We speak of cultural values of specific societies or communities.

In metaphysical capitalism matter will consist not of congealed homogenous labour but processual heterogeneous life. Matter does not congeal in metaphysical capitalism: it is proicessual. The atom congeals in its equilibrium. The monad with its trace and disequilibrium is always in process. Form does more or less congeal, but not matter. Matter is heterogeneous, each monadic bit different to every other. Leibniz of course makes a major distinction between monadic substance and extensive matter. That is, between noumenon and phenomenon. In metaphysical capitalism as we saw above this distinction collapses into indifference. The unit of matter becomes not the commodity but the bit of information. These are not the 0s and 1s, but only exist when a difference is made . Information is when one system communicates its state to our system. When our system receives this as a perturbation, it is information. The information comes through structural cipling. It is the history of structural coiing that decides whether this change of state of system B is to be operatinalised by system a as information or merely as noise. Only in the first case does the change in state make a difference. Finally all areas of life – including of course nonhuman life - in metaphysical capitlsaism are generators of such material causation All areas of life are such sources of information as material process (Fraser, Kember and Lury 2005).

Formal Cause
There is a surprising ‘stickiness’ of form even, given the dominance of process in the metaphysical age. In biology, the failures of the human genome project attest to this stickiness. Despite the seeming infinity of genetic mutations, phenotype persists, and phenotypic space is vastly empty. His paucity of phenotypes in the context of seemingly unlimited genetic information generating possibilities attests to the continued power of formal cause, and to the limitations of cause from material structures. So how do we explaining this stickiness of phenotype, of form? This is not explicable by teleological cause of natural selection. Niches can change, environments can change radically, but forms persist; species persist for millions of years. And in the context of very many niches. In global geo-politics strong nations persist relatively independent of the environmental niches they inhabit. The point is that causality in the contemporary age is just as much about the preservation of form, including social forms as about their destruction and mutation. And the problem is perhaps even more than explaining change, how can we explain continuity or this stickiness.

What can it mean to say that form causes itself? In Aristotle you have more or less timeless forms, genera and species. These are essences that explain the shape of individuals, like the particular birthday cake. In modernity, form is not timeless, yet a form’s temporality is in an important sense reversible. The same is assumed in modernist architecture and planning – think of Corbusier. The assumptions are equilibriate. There are parallels here in the notion of reproduction that we have in the structuralist sociology of Bourdieu. In Bourdieu we have equilibriate reproduction of the society and social class. Now however we no longer are dealing with timelessness, but path dependency (Urry 2002), with traces and decay. We are dealing with systems at far from equlibrium states that nonetheless persist as forms. They maintain their operational closure, that is, their system-ness or form-ness, while being in a disequilibrium state (Varela et al 1997:201). They do this through structural coupling with their external and internal environments. Thus in the organism there is such coupling at levels of generic information, protein, cell, tissue, organ, organism (phenotype or form). The organism draws on cellular and molecular protein and gene networks – as we see in immunology - to reconstitute tissue and to fight viruses or bacteria (Bentley 2001).

Teleological (First, Final) Cause
Value-substance is the value of congealed homogenous labour. Value-form, or the commodity is the immaterial yet physical bodily extension of value-substance. The value-form is the commodity insofar as it consists of exchange-value. It is its physicality that generates the superstructures. But exchange-value, the number of units comprised in a commodity that exchanges on markets is determined by not efficient, or material or formal cause. At stake here is teleological cause. This is not ultimate, but proximate teleological cause. Thus in use-value, the cause and value of the commodity lies in the concrete and singular use of it. Marx’s use-value pace Baudrillard (1983) has nothing to do with utility. In most all its discussion in Capital I, use-value is of singular things. Only in one instance in Capital is use-value a question of units of utility. And that is in the use-value of labour power to the capitalist. This is only metaphorically use-value. It is a question of units of utility to the capitalist. Here Marx says the use-value of labour-power to the capitalist is in surplus of what he paid for it on the market, or its exchange value. This is of course the source of surplus-value. The term use-value is misleading in this context. Use-value is the value of concrete utility. It has no measure and cannot be divided into units. In this case the value of labour-power to the capitalist is measurable and consists of units of abstract utility. This indeed is exchange-value. The commodity insofar as it is determined by its exchange value is determined by its purpose. This is teleological cause. This purpose or function is in regard to an environment, which is a market. The purpose is the demand-side of the market, much like the teleological cause of the cake discussed above was Joey’s birthday. Or Joey’s happiness on his birthday. The demand-side of the market, which is the purpose, consists of aggregated preference schedules. This is abstract utility.

In the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard then wrongly understands use-value in terms of abstract equivalence. Thus he mistakes use-value for exchange-value. Use-value instead shares with the gift the register of concrete inequivalence. He compounds this in his idea of sign-value, which he calls ‘sign-exchange-value’. He understands this in terms of the extensive language of Saussurean semiotics, and in terms of abstract units of linguistic exchange. A number of writers have taken sign-value this as a new mode of non-linear value. But value in metaphysical capitalism is in units not of equivalence, but abstract inequivalence. This might be characterised as say ‘difference-value’. It is quantitative, unlike use-value. But it is not extensive like exchange-value. It is instead intensive like number, the derivative, like fractals and attractors. It is topological. Units of information consist of differences. They must make a difference to a receiving system, and each unit is different from every other.

For Aristotle all of his four types of cause were reasons. That is, a thing’s causes - the causes of an individual - were also its reasons. Leibniz’s metaphysics understood each individual monad in terms of its sufficient reason. If there were two perfectly identical substances, then there would be any sufficient reason for each to occupy its own location than that of the other. So the full – all the four causes – cause of the individual is its sufficient reason. Now monads which are eternal, evolve, through their traces in order increasingly to incorporate reason. They never, however, evolve to the point of the absolute, of God who incorporates not absolute power but absolute reason. God is first and final cause. For Walter Benjamin (1977: 143) man could approach the metaphysical absolute through language: i.e. not extensive semiotic language but intensive Adamic language. Of contemporaries perhaps Goethe’s poetry came closest to this. For Benjamin the other window onto the absolute, the metaphysical was mathematics. Here implicitly is Leibniz’s monad, which is a point of view on the world: on the spatiotemporal relationality of the world. With the becoming of the monad this perceived relationality becomes increasingly rational. The most rational this could be without of fully approaching the absolute was the differential calculus (Serres 1968: 768 f.). The dx/dy relationality, the differential is as deep as rationality can go in terms of implicating relationality. The differential is quantitative but not metric. It consists of quantitative intensity.

We are moving from proximate to ultimate teleological cause. And here is where final and first cause come together. Indeed for Marx the deep structure, i.e. the base material cause and fist cause come together. The ultimate cause is thus the economy or congealed abstract labour time in capitalism. But Marx’s first cause is material and physical. We are looking in an age of information an abstract difference for a first cause that is material and metaphysical. We have just alluded to this via Leibniz’s differential. This is developed in some depth in Antonio Negri’s (1991) (Savage Anomaly in which the author recasts Spinoza’s natural/divine character of single substance as ‘materiality’. Such materiality is the deepest structural cause or first cause . Similarly Leibniz’s differential is at the heart of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the virtual, of the ‘plane of immanence’ in Difference and Repetition. For Deleuze the virtual is difference-in-itself: the virtual is difference’s noumenon. Deleuze’s virtual generates the actual, metric world we encounter through a process of actualization, which Deleuze (1968:317) characterises as differenciation. We arrive at the virtual or the plane of immanence itself through a process of differentiaion: a process of virtualization that will bring us towards the plane of immanence. Differenciation is like integration or integral calculus and differentiation is like the differential calculus. Differenciation is a bit like structural differentiation in the sociology of modernization. In German this is rendered as Ausdifferenzieurung. But Deleuze’s differentiation is like de-differentiation (Entdifferenzieurung): a move towards indifference, implosion, compression. That which actualises in terms of actual movement of bodies and which we can graphically draw on x and y axes de-differenciates or differentiates to a single point, a non-metric point of instantaneous acceleration. Similarly a process of differentiation will bring us from the most differenciated or actual level of Euclidean geometry to the non-metric topology or Riemann geometry (Delanda 2001). This differentiated plane of immanence is also the space for non-metric fractals or attractors or the vector plane that differenciates out into solids. Finally as Delanda points out, the plane of immanence is Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’, the de-differentiated and informe body which itself differenciates into the actual body with organs.

This originally Spinozan plane of immanence becomes at the same time metaphysical and physical for Deleuze. Deleuze’s noumenal difference in-itself is also the physical intensity that is central to so much of today’s non-linear science and mathematics. For Spinoza nature/the divine is the generator of all the individuals, of the monads and indeed of the actual. It is at this point that Spinoza’s metaphysics approaches Leibniz’s. Here is where the single substance of first cause generates the multiplicity of differences, which are the still intensive monads. This is what Deleuze calls the field of individuation, and before Leibniz began to speak of monads, he called these entities of infinite difference ‘individuals’. So first cause is the single substance of the plane of immanence or difference-in-itself. And what it generates is what Deleuze calls ‘difference-for-itself’, which is the plane of the monads or individuation. For Deleuze further actualization will take us to the extensity of the actual itself.

Deleuze’s ontology, his metaphysical materiality, is inspired by and grounded in science (Delanda 2001). Negri’s (1991) metaphysical materiality in contrast is grounded in politics. It thus is a political ontology. Negri calls the single substance of noumenal difference ‘materiality’. This is a political and economic materiality. What such materiality generates is singularities, it is monads (Lazzarato 2002, 2004). The single undifferenciated substance of materiality generates through differenciation the infinity of monads, of singularities. This collective of singularities are Hardt and Negri’s political ‘multitudes’. Economically they are labour that has already escaped from the factory, working – as not homogenous atoms but singular monads in a register of invention and producing difference. This neo-Marxist materiality is heterogeneous unlike Marx’s homogenous material. In this neo-Marxism it is not just labour that is producing in a register of inequivalence, it is all the areas of social, natural and machinic life. In this neo-Marxism, the material becomes the metaphysical.

We need to make but one more step. We need only to understand this new metaphysical materiality as informational. We have already introduced information into the equation in the discussion above of formal cause. We understood the disequilibriate preservation of form via structural coupling. Here systems through operations of coupling with other systems brought in information. (Spuybroek 2004). We defined information via Bateson as that which makes a difference to the structurally-coupling receiving system. Bateson of course famously understood information as a difference that makes a difference. That is, as a noumenal difference that generates phenomenal difference. It is a difference generator.
Bateson’s information-in-itself (the difference that makes a difference) is the generator of information-for-itself (the difference that is made). If it does not make a difference it is not information. This is first empirical difference (and empirical information), as it enters form through structural coupling with the environment. It is second, as it were, transcendental information, as generated from the sort of differentiated matter in the plane of immanence. Indeed in biological nature and in today’s informational capitalism, information is determining system and form from the immediate environment and its deep structures at the same time (Malik 2005; Mackenzie 2005).

CAPITALISM BECOMES METAPHYSICAL: MONEY COMES TO LIFE
In Don De Lillo’s (1994) Cosmopolis, Eric Packer is a 28-year-old asset manager in April 2000, the month of the dot.com crash. Eric works in finance, in money. He is speculating during the 24 hours of the novel against the yen. He works in the idiom of finance. Eric, who had read a poem, in which ‘a rat becomes the unit of currency’, lives in the world of his seamless, hermetically sealed limousine, in a world of finance, of derivatives, in which money becomes a living, breathing, indeed heaving database. Eric lives in an environment of pure abstraction: abstract money, abstract sex, an environment of abstract inequivalents.

‘He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and clambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-onenesss of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.’ (p. 24)

What could be more abstract and physical than money? Exchange-value itself is the exchange value of a commodity – be it a consumer product, labour-power or constant capital. Money is what mediates between exchange-values. If every use-value has an exchange value, then money is exchange-value’s exchange-value; it is instrumental rationality’s instrument, hence today’s idiom of ‘financial instruments’ is not misplaced. Productive capital circulates C-M-C’, in which M (money) is exchanged against labour-power and constant capital, and C’ is of greater value than C. Money or financial capital circulates M-M’, without the mediation of anything like C, the commodity. The commodity is two-sided said Marx, the two-fold nature of the commodity: on the one side concrete and particular i.e. use value, on the other abstract and general, exchange-value. Money however is only one-sided, it is never concrete and particular: always universal and abstract. Money is the universal equivalent. For Marx all commodities are particular equivalents of money. That is because all other commodities are use values too. Money’s use-value is its exchange-value or how it functions in exchange. Without money we do not have exchange of equivalents on markets. On markets what happens is not that commodities exchange but money exchanges for exchange-values of particular equivalents. Money exchanges for particular equivalents. Commodity A and commodity B do not exchange places but money and commodity A change places. And commodity A becomes an equivalent because of money. In the absence of money, it is a particular inequivalent, i.e. not a commodity at all. Money converts use-values (as concrete and particular) into exchange values; it converts monads into atoms; it converts singularities into commodities. And commodities are at the same time monads and atoms: intensities and extensities. As Leibniz says every monad has a body. Except for money. If money cannot be exchanged it is a bit like yesterday’s papers: without use-value. It is the commodity that is never a singularity. It is arguably the only thing whose in-itself is a for-itself. It would seem the only being, whose intensity is extensity. The three classic media are language, money and the media of communications themselves. Language’s in-itself as Walter Benjamin noted was the religious, the Adamic language of Paradise. That is language’s in-itself is the symbol. Its for-itself is signs. Money’s in-itself, as we noted, is its for-itself. Its metaphysics is already physics. As for the media: the television or computer screen, its for-itself is its light-through in-itself. The screen like contemporary capitalism is already metaphysical.

Yet in a metaphysical capitalism, in today’s immaterial capitalism money itself is no longer just a medium. It is a product. Banks have turnover, profit, market capitalization. Banking is the largest ‘industrial’ sector of the FT’s (Financial Times) Global 500. 66 of the World’s largest 500 corporations are banks. Citigroup is the World’s fifth largest corporation by market cap (($259 bn). Bank of America is the world’s tenth largest corporation; HSBC is 11th and Morgan Stanley 16th. What was a medium, and this is also true in the media sector - has become a thing, a product: an instrument in the case of money. We have now financial products. And firms employ ever more mathematicians to develop an ever-greater diversity of financial products. This is banking’s R&D. We have flexible specialization, post-fordism in banking, in which the labour of design, of R&D of financial products comes to match the labour of production. This is the case especially for derivatives, as now we come to speak of ‘traditional’ and ‘derivative financial instruments’ (D. MacKenzie 2003). As Lee and LiPuma (2002) note, derivatives are constituted in the idiom of risk. If share prices are a matter of taking bets on the future profitability of a firm, then derivatives, as Linda Davies (2000) writes in Into the Fire are a question of taking bets on people taking bets. So the exchange-value of a firm is no longer just the already abstract exchange-value of its assets, of its fixed and circulating constant capital, and the variable capital of its labour force. It is more abstract than exchange value. The exchange-value of a firm now is the sum of a collection of bets on its future profitability. The exchange value of a firm has to do more with capital-markets than product markets. Yet money is becoming increasingly a product. Derivatives – whether futures or options - are yet more abstract than this. They are bets on the sum of other people’s bets or just as much hedges – bets placed to minimise risk of people losing from their own bets. More and more, the M-M’ of financial risk-markets drives the M-C-M of production. Surely there is risk in productive investment. But M-M’ is pure risk. Derivatives are then attempts to hedge the risk of owning things that are subjects to price fluctuations . Investment in derivatives is this a mode of risk management. Yet they have notoriously susceptible to corruption or financial collapse, for example, the Long Term Capital Management crash in 1998 and the Barings and Enron scandals. The unintended consequences of managing risks are risk creation, thus fitting perfectly the theories of Ulrich Beck. Moreover, attempts at equilibrium push the chronic disequilibrium of today’s intensive capitalism.

Yet this hyper-abstraction of market capitalisation and derivatives, one betting on the future, and the other betting on (and against) bets on the future – this abstract physical that is even more abstract than the physical, this hyper-extensity of money is at the same time shot through with intensity, with life, with the metaphysical. For De Lillo’s Eric, money, in its even further double abstraction as data and digitised on a screen, brings into play the life and intensity of ‘organic patterns, birdwing and clambered shell’. This money as screen-data is doubly mediatised, indeed trebly so as mediated thirdly through the language-exchange of traders (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger 2002). Yet these ‘numbers and charts’ De Lillo continues are not a question of the alienation, the ‘cold compression’ of man’s ‘energy’ and ‘yearning’ into the ‘dead and spotless financial markets’. Indeed instead money as screen-data (and here we have the fourth mode of mediation and abstraction, i.e. of mathematical symbols) itself is metaphysical. It is ‘soulful’ (as monads) , and ‘glowing’ (light through). Yet this abstract cognitive digital is at the same time noumenal as an ‘imperative’: ‘it is the breath of the billions, the heave of the biosphere’. If the media-screen becomes heaving, biological and live in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, money takes on life in De Lillo’s Cosmopolis.

So capitalism, at its most abstract, much more abstract than the commodity, at its most extensive abstract physical is at the same time at its intensive and metaphysical. A doubly abstract risk-process of M-M’, once derivative of the concrete production process C-M-C’, is now at centre stage driving the production process. We see this in the place of banks in the FT 500: in the hegemony of market capitalization. In the UK the finance sector in the City of London is the lifeblood of the entire British economy, and the world’s (i.e. London) most thriving labour market. The new capitalism is based in sectors not of goods or even of services but of media: of media as screen, as money and as language (education, affect sectors) as genetic code in biotechnology. Yet these very media have become products, have become things in an age when capitalism has become metaphysical. Jakob Arnoldi (2005) has likened the financial derivative to the derivative in differential calculus and to the process of differentiation as described above in Deleuze’s plane of immanence. Classically, the ‘dismal science’ dealt with how to steer markets and national economies back to their natural equilibria. Now financial products attempt to carve out islands of equilibrium in what has become a sea of disequilibrium: islands of security in a sea of risk and contingency. To secure these islands in the actual may necessitate a whole new set of non-metric mathematical operations – of transcendental information - in the virtual.

Concluding Thoughts
Max Weber’s oeuvre obsessed with the metaphysical. Weber carried out long studies of the world religions and wrote a detailed Religionssoziologie in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Weber was obsessed with the genetic question of the origins of capitalist modernity. Weber, concerned with the ‘value’ origins of ‘fact’, was looking for the principle of emergence of the historical individual that was capitalism. Weber looked at all the world religions, at the range of the metaphysical cosmologies and asked out of which of these varieties of the metaphysical can the physical be born? That is which of these varieties of metaphysics contains within it the germ of the physical ? His (2001) answer was Protestantism. Inside Christian metaphysics, the ideal interests of ascetic Protestant ‘prophets’ had as consequence the retreat of the sacred and the expansion of the realm of the physical. In this process arise the ‘third person truths’ of objective investors and the objective scientists that Robert Merton (2002) wrote about in his work on Protestantism and the rise of modern science. The Reformation was one early-modern pillar of the Enlightenment. The other of course was the Renaissance. Galileo and Descartes were not Protestants. Thus there is a certain ‘Renaissance ethic’ at work in Erwin Panofsky’s (1997) benchmark Perspective as Symbolic Form, where again we see the birth of the physical from the metaphysical and the rise of third-person truths .

The Protestant Ethic was about the rise of physical capitalism, i.e. Western capitalism. And western objectivity was conducive to this rise. But when science and for that matter social science become metaphysical, the observer is no longer objective. He/she is embedded in the system. We have drawn on the work of Francisco Varela throughout this paper to develop this. At stake are observer effects and what Varela calls first-person truths. First-, and not third-, person truths have from time immemorial and continue to be the paradigm of Eastern and South Asia religions, the religions of India and China. In physical capitalism’s linear systems, in which cause was external and reproduction was paradigmatic, Western third-person truths were at the heart of capital accumulation. But now in twenty-first century capitalism, systems come to self-organize, non-linear systems and embedded observers become increasingly paradigmatic in science, social science and the arts. Could Francis Fukuyama be wrong? Are we moving towards a world dominated not by the equilibrium and equivalences of the neo-liberal market, but one in which exchange of inequivalence and disequilibrium will be selected by the increasingly global environment? In such an age - as economics takes on progressively the colours of metaphysics – will capital first and foremost accumulate in the East?

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