There IS "No Agency"

In Marx’s model, humans perform acts of labor on nature to create commodities, which they bring to market to exchange with each other. An interaction of use values thus gives rise to their general determination as exchange values, but the latter requires a collectively agreed upon unit; thus appears money, “the absolutely alienable commodity, because it is all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation. It reads all prices backwards, and thus as it were mirrors itself in the bodies of all other commodities, which provide the material through which it can come into being as a commodity. At the same time the prices, those wooing glances cast at money by the commodities, define the limit of its convertibility, namely its own quantity” (Capital Volume One, 252). Money and commodity first exist in mutual interdependence, and the former, a single unit of exchange value as such, exists only for the sake of and as a means to commodities, pure potential in itself, manifest only in particular exchange values in the monetary form, for the sake of consumption of commodities. This money becomes capital, however, when individuals do not merely sell a commodity for money to buy another commodity (C-M-C), but rather reverse the process, and buy a commodity for the sake of re-selling it (M-C-M), focusing on the means as an end in itself; money feeds on itself as an end in itself to create more money, and commodities serve only as vehicles of money for the purpose of its growth. This growth is limitless because it is simply the pure law of more, of surplus value. Value “suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms…instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself…it differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person” in a perpetual process of “self-valorization [which] brings forth living offspring” (263), throws a plethora of commodities off of itself to further profit. Just as a commodity is recognized as embodied money, so is money recognized as a commodity, an end, a thing which, in essence, can be bought or sold. From this point on, it is money which is buying and selling itself through the cycle of production, consumption, exchange. This infinite feedback loop erases all fixed reference points, all difference between means and ends, and the system becomes even more circular and rhizomatic in the global market, when different monies come together as so many commodities and reflect each other in the relational scrambling of value, so that in the end the process can only be defined as “money which is worth more money, value which is greater than itself” (264).
The process is pulled along from beginning to end by the same desire. Humans are driven to the market by the social impulse, by desire, by labor; use-value, and with it exchange value, are reflections of individual and collective desire; finally, money symbolizes desire-in-itself as a fluid potentiality capable of desiring itself, stirring its own effulgence through and beyond the symbolic market. Money is the desire of the market as an autonomous entity that breathes through supply and demand, wriggles its limbs through the proliferation of commodities, constantly wavers and flickers with a pulse of its own in the fluctuating values of each commodity, as the market becomes attuned to, sensitive of itself; at the heart of this beast is the pyre of desire on which the material commodity is sacrificed, transubstantiated up to capital, and reborn again as more commodities in a limitless regenerative process. Just as a single human is a desiring-machine, so is the market a desiring-machine, and both throw off “the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe” (Bataille, 21).
Bataille envisions an ever-growing surplus of burnoff, Marx sees the mechanism of this glow in the self-consuming and –transcending value, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin likewise describes how “at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order” (The Phenomenon of Man, 268). The pivot of globalization hinges, in Teilhard’s words, on the question “how, without being impeded or deformed, can the innumerable particular curves be inscribed or even prolonged in their common envelope?” (260). His Omega is not the erasure of difference in homogenous singularity but rather “the exaltation, not merely the conservation, of elements by convergence” in which “union differentiates…the Universal and Personal (that is to say, the ‘centred’) grow in the same direction and culminate simultaneously in each other…[heterogeneous elements] do not tend to lose their outlines and blend, but, on the contrary, accentuate the depth and incommunicability of their egos…[so that] the more ‘other’ they become in conjunction, the more they find themselves as ‘self’” (262). It would be mistaken, then, “to represent Omega to ourselves simply as a centre born of the fusion of elements which it collects, or annihilating them in itself”, a homogenizing signifier. Rather “by its structure Omega, in its ultimate principle, can only be a distinct Centre radiating at the core of a system of centres; a grouping in which personalization of the All and personalizations of the elements reach their maximum, simultaneously and without merging, under the influence of a supremely autonomous focus of union” (262). It would manifest as a sharpening of the entire global picture, a universal Democratic-Socialist localization founded on a mutual respect of difference upon a ground of unity that grows more firm as each part solidifies itself as irreducibly heterogeneous. Such is the dream of the immanent synthesis of global government and market, where the former emerges as a reflection of the latter; Pierre’s twist is that this self-sufficient global network is founded in reference to a transcendent Other, the above-mentioned force of surplus desire pointed to (reified?) as the true site of agency.
Global capitalism has achieved a perverted immanence wherein the desire of the market spills over into the governance of the people, a governance which rather than emanating from a transcendent ruler (often equally unbalanced) is diffused throughout the self-transcending productive and consumptive flows of cultural-ideological brainwashing; this unbridled proliferation of semiotic capital-desire is overcathected, neurotically imbalanced in the capitalist repression of the proletariat. Unification exists “at the top among the few, the very few”, while fragmentation rules “at the bottom among the many, the very many” that, in reaction to the former, cling to a disappearing individuality (Hetata, 283). The corporations control the nation-states and the people, but the corporations, like commodities, are ripples on the surface of the organism of capital that transcends and creates us, and ignorance of this fact “causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way” (Bataille, 23). The exponential surge of capital has carried along with it a noosphere of, in the words of Donna Haraway, “distributed, heterogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net called the global…[in a] historically specific technoscientific womb” from which spring forth “cyborg life forms that inhabit the recently congealed planet Earth… imploded germinal entities, densely packed condensations of worlds, shocked into being from the force of the implosion of the natural and the artificial, nature and culture, subject and object, machine and organic body, money and lives, narrative and reality. Cyborgs are the stem cells in the marrow of the technoscientific body; they differentiate into the subjects and objects at stake in the contested zones of technoscientific culture” (ModestWitness@SecondMillenium, 14). This is Teilhard’s vision of a heterogeneous bioecotechnoscientific body evolving from, in Haraway’s words, “the domain of ‘life’, with its developmental and organic temporalities…[into that] of ‘life itself’, with its temporalities embedded in communications enhancement and system redesign…life enterprised up, where…the species becomes the brand name and the figure becomes the price” (12). To surrender autonomy to the capital Other does not mean homogeneous takeover, rather in the force which transcends us is found the ground of our unity, wherein a unified world government can cradle and channel the diffuse world market towards this Other before whom can be displayed the full depth of heterogeneous waste.