Capitalizing on the Capital of capital

Benjamin’s piece shows the multiple and intersected meanings of capital at play.

According to the online etymology dictionary, as early as 1100 AD, the term capital was in use to “designate the principal sum of a money loan. The principal part of a loan was contrasted with the "usury"--later called interest--the payment made to the lender in addition to the return of the sum lent. This usage, unknown to classical Latin, had become common by the thirteenth century and possibly had begun as early as 1100 A.D., in the first chartered towns of Europe. [Frank A. Fetter, "Reformulation of the Concepts of Capital and Income in Economics and Accounting," 1937, in "Capital, Interest, & Rent," 1977].” Thus, capital was meant to emphasize a main “chief, first,” part, and more specifically, of the head (capitulum). Conjointly by the fourteenth century, the term capital was being associated with mortality:

A capital crime (1520s) is one that affects the life or "head;" capital had a sense of "deadly, mortal" from late 14c. in English, a sense also found in Latin. The felt connection between "head" and "life, mortality" also existed in Old English: e.g. heafodgilt "deadly sin, capital offense," heafdes þolian "to forfeit life." Capital punishment was in Blackstone (1765) and classical Latin capitis poena.

 

I begin pondering the historical use of the term capital as we are asked this week to examine, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” by Walter Benjamin, as he explains how Paris came to be a global head of a modern era, Paris as representative supreme of a modern global economy built in a sense, on fantasies made possible by the death of “old” forms and old ways of being for projected desires of the new. Though he does not employ the term, simulacrum, Benjamin’s chapter from The Arcades Project, extends last week’s focus and the implications of urbanization that Poe and de Certeau explore, and in a sense, recreate. However, while Poe and de Certeau disrupt our point of view from the omniscient or bird’s eye perspective to the ground level maze, Benjamin returns us to the metanarrative as he attempts to historicize Paris-in-transformation through institutions that became commercialized as they simultaneously spread commercialism through fantasy and the desire and/or projection of luxury. Thus, he begins with the arcades and its simulacrum where to walk its corridors comes to (falsely) represent experiencing the city as a whole. Of course, literal structure and façade (buildings, trains, etc) could not have been constructed without the material advancement and industry of iron, and the commercial use of the arts (panoramas) as an early use of media. Globalization and urbanization propel “transitory purposes” (4), and Benjamin in this section of his chapter seems to be prefiguring a future outcome that occurred in late capitalism-and that is the disposability of (surplus) labor in global terms and  the built-in or planned obsolescence in products. Though he discusses the early role of the entertainment industry and fashion in promoting alienation and one’s own commodification (7-8), since The Arcades Project was written in 1935 (and since he makes no mention of it), I am thinking about a “fast food nation” and our reliance on prefabrication and prepackaging-necessary for the “private individual” and the facilitation of the “domestic interior” to maintain his fantasies (freedom, luxury, dominance of one’s domain, etc). Of course, these fantasies serve capital and our compliance as workers.

A question I do have is how does his critique now fit the bourgeoisie or if the bourgeoisie is even applicable in our times? I chose to read it as hegemony, rather. I also ended the article wondering if “With the destabilization of a market economy” if we indeed or at all “begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie in ruins even before they have crumbled” (13)? If not, does it still continue to be a utopian envisioning of the future? Lastly, I continue to wonder how these texts both foretell and are limited by the applicability of these theorists’ concepts to technology. For example, de Certeau’s walking, becomes online browsing.  It seems so apropos that the arcades gave way to shopping online and through television programming, truly making the “living room….the theater of the world” (9) where these fantasies, projections, and transactions are made or desired.