“The economic world does not stand still. One change precipitates another. There is always an opportunity for a strong nation to mix in. Here, too, the slogan “Carpe diem” is to be applied.”
-Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen.

The problem is to think of capital as a dynamic system without recourse to analogical interpretations of capital-as-organism. However, the movements of biological systems seem to inhere to capital’s reproduction and reprogramming of itself both spatially and historically. We should therefore be engaging the relation between capital and its environment and interrogate capital as a “total [global] system” capable of distributing, processing and organizing “liquid”/material flows. Without biologizing capital, we should treat it as an extension of life, or a reflection upon it. Capitalism is the perceived technology deemed necessary for survival within its own totalizing systematicity.

Beniger (1986, 106-9) defines “life” in terms of organization, metabolism and growth, responsiveness, adaptability, reproduction and evolution. The earliest organisms were (and in many cases are) resultant of a solar “energy bombardment” that continually produce(d) new, diverse arrangements of molecules. These organisms arranged themselves and entered into subsequent relations with one another through the management of solar energy. Being that each of these “new” organisms constitute autopoietic unities, they, by definition, are programmed for reproduction: the processing and control of solar energy is subordinated to the organism’s program, which lends itself teleonomically toward preservation and reproduction. In other words, the system’s metabolism (itself programmatically oriented) synthesizes energy and inorganic material to “fuel” the system in reproduction and sustenance. Viewing capitalism as a “processing system” (Beniger, 32-3), we see a parallel self-sustenance to that of the organism: the processing of material, information and energy flows is caught up in the teleonomic movement of preservation and reproduction. The metabolizing phenomenon of living systems is clearly at hand in the capitalistic appropriation of various energies (biospheric, libidinal) for these counter-entropic purposes. However, it seems necessary, as Maturana and Varela (1987, 59-60) do in relation to biological systems, to distinguish between two types of reproduction—replication and copying—and project the appropriate back onto capital.

It would seem that the “homogenizing” tendency of capital is that of pure replication: the cropping up of identical systematic unities in diverse territories. However, the replicated unity, as they point out, is “operationally different” (ibid.) from the program that produced it and therefore exists outside the lineage of the producer, outside its network of communication and reciprocity. It must be said then that in reproduction, capital copies itself, or copies its model which is continually adapting, evolving, and rearranging its elements relation to the environment. The heightened procession of this movement into the realm of information, media and medicine has meant the implosion/convergence of capital and its model: “All energy, all events are absorbed by this concentric gravitation, everything condenses and implodes toward the only micromodel of control…as conversely, in the other, biological dimension, everything converges and implodes on the micromodel of the genetic code” (Baudrillard 1994, 35). In this sense the evolution of capital is not synonymous with its geographical expansion; its basis of operation and control has evolved from (yet still encompasses) the macro-level of the nation-state (the metropole and the periphery) to the micro-level of genetics, atmospherics (Muzak, allergy medication, the airport, the mall) and molecular electronics. Just as DNA is the integrating component that provides the communicative link between the differentiated parts of multicellular organisms, the micromodel of control provides the means for organizing production beyond the factory.

The generational (meant in the historical sense but again in the spatial sense as well) copying of the capitalist system can be described via the nature of “reproductive fracture” which allows for variation in the structure of a system while preserving the organization of the original (Maturana and Varela, 61-2). The molecular composition of capital “admit[s] many planes of fracture” (ibid.), meaning that it can rearrange, displace or de-emphasize any of its components to affectively adapt to new terrain while still maintaining its relation as part of a larger (metacellular, or metasystematic) unity. Thus, the total systemic unity of capital is made of parts with “no separation between the reproducing system and the reproduced system” (ibid. 63).

Mercantile capitalism and modern colonial ventures embody reproductive fracture and the simultaneous establishment of integrated circuitry between the parts and unity of an expanding system. Expansion and integration draw upon two facets or “analytic dimensions” of living systems: the static dimension of organization, which is preserved in the reproduced, and a dynamic metabolism, which allows the reproduced system to creatively adapt, process and appropriate environmental phenomena that differs from that processed by the original system (Beniger, 110). Reproductive fracture accounts for the ease with which new parts (or subsystems) interact with its predecessor; capital’s “genome” is the “operational instructions” that are given in reproduction. Distribution via roads, railways and air is wholly dependent upon the consistency of operational instructions throughout the network of subsystems. Greenwich Mean Time provides a system-wide reference point around which the distribution of goods and the global workday revolve. But the clock does more than merely measure homogenous units of time: it functions as a “social machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 141-2) that intervenes in the continuous flow of events to produce functionally differentiated times of day. Work, leisure, dinnertime, Miller Time, iPod time, “me-time,” etc…these vintage temporal institutions would lack distinction without the social implications of universal time. The various global monetary equivalents (the pound, the dollar, etc.) also provide for the efficient movement of capital regardless of the nation-state –a sight of possible friction to be circumnavigated.

The notion of production as advanced universally by capitalism draws on both the consistency of a specific organization that can respond to friction generated by incompatible phenomena while still processing environmental variants in order to adapt. In terms of production we see that capital (or a facet thereof) can reproduce itself as agent of control on the level of materiality and of desire. Preserving homeostasis and regulating flows requires a metabolism of desire and industry in relation to system-wide considerations—there is “productions of production” at a multiplicity of levels (ibid.). Production as a particular program of control—as a teleonomic activity with specifications for excreting “product”—is a kind of indissoluble mechanism with an infinitude of applications. Programmatized production, however, would not be a universal technique of capital if it did not metabolize environmental perturbations, or mediate itself in relation to the terrain of the market, the libido, the ontological orientation of a society or class, etc. Fracture upon fracture, this is how capital molecularizes itself.

Here a distinction appears between the evolution of living systems and that of the capitalist system, but the difference is presently unclear. For the living system, cellular compartmentalization and the integration of micro-phenomena such as neuronal structures and genetic code is the base from which biological expansion, diversification and complexification proceeds. On the one hand, capital proceeds negatively in relation to this biological model particularly in its dissolution into the micromodel and hyper compartmentalization, which appear to embody an evolutionary ascendency to the molecular (as opposed to proceeding from it). On the other, we see the movement of decomplexification (Luhmann 1984, 26-8) that concretizes the total system, eliminating extraneous components and coordinating subsystems (i.e. systems of production in the Global South) to a universal, translatable standard. A working answer (without actually drawing the above distinction) could be that the tension between a molecular-based program of control and the system-wide directive of decomplexification is a necessary one. Molecular micro-management of everyday life—i.e. its fragmentation—is the means by which disparate subsystems (for the subject is a type of systemic machine inscribed within processes) can be integrated into a system with increasingly less friction and less complexity.