From the Abuse Value
and other abysses
As already laid out in this series exploring Martin’s œuvre, he began his writing career questioning what a computer was, laying out the groundwork of those early thoughts in his first published article titled Digitale Metaphysik. 1 He followed this with Im Arbeitsspeicher,2 published in Jan 1990, as a chapter on the rationalization of work in which he continued building on that groundwork, examining the nature of human rationalization; how it differs from the computer’s spatial rationality as he looked at the effects of digitalisation on the workspace; and what makes intellectual work irreplaceable by a machine. A significant difference between computer spatiality and the ephemeral real world is digitalised time’s reversibility, how dimensional space can be infinitely varied — and how both hint at the possibility of the computer being a Universal Machine. Later that year, he wrote an essay titled Die Universale Maschine,3 in which he confirmed his thinking that this is true – laying the groundwork for his first two books, Metamorphosen von Raum,4 published in 1994, followed by Vom Geist der Machine5 in 1999.
The following translation is of a lecture Martin gave shortly after Vom Geist der Machine was listed on the Sachbuch Bestenliste6 in 1999, providing us with a snapshot of just how far he’d spun that initial groundwork into a rich and complex thought labyrinth. And while it’s a humorous response to a request for a presentation on Time, it also reflects his development of those threads he laid out in 1990’s Im Arbeitsspeicher — containing a dead serious prescience on the effects of Georg Franck’s Attention Economics,7 which has become today’s familiar digital click economy. He starts the lecture with a tongue-in-cheek visualization on the sound of quanta metrics, reminding the audience how work, already profoundly changed in response to the computer and digitalisation, is now becoming quantified as a function of audience attention and time. In laying out his theme of Time is Money is Time, he sets his framework around temporal savings since Time is Money and Money is Time. And as he works its thematics, he references various leitmotifs and threads he’d been developing over the previous 12 years. In particular, these are: 1) The Wheelwork [Räderwerk], metaphorized as the Mechanical Clock that’s the Social Drive [Triebwerk] of the second Universal Machine and its Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomat]. 2) His Greek pre-history tracing out the notion of an inner polis with its clearly internalizing movement as a kind of oikonomos, a radicalized psycho-economy [Psychoökonomie] where there’s constant psychical metabolism between psyche and praxis. In terms of early economic science, he noticed it operates in the shape of the market, meaning Adam Smith’s unconscious ‘invisible hand,’ which Martin referred to as the unconscious psychophysics of the second Universal Machine. In this lecture, he compares psychophysics to the unconscious outsourcing of the third Universal Machine that he terms psychologistics. In later works, these threads become his central leitmotif: the Psychotope. 3) His continued tracing of what makes Imagination Power [Einbildungskraft] the Power Plant [Kraftwerk] of these psycho-economic Social Drives [Gesellschaftstriebwerks].
Most importantly, Martin lays out these threads as tools for examining Attention Economics as he presages what it will become in our current world. In this presentation, as with much of his writing and thinking, we find thematic threads anticipating a something in its structural form — a something that’s emerged over time as a social-cultural phenomenon. And it’s this attention to what’s coming that makes his thinking so presciently interesting: because if an Attention Economy leads into a world in which an Abuse Value can be asserted and profited from (something for which many have termed sinisterly as the Victim Olympics), its certainly a something we need to fully understand – something culturally we should have been paying attention to in 1999 — instead of being taken by its surprise after the fact.
Time is Money is Time8
Lecture, Wolfgangsee 1999
Ladies, Gentlemen,
In the letter inviting me to speak, I was asked to limit myself to 30 minutes — and that's precisely what I'll do. I'll lecture for 30 minutes and stop when this little alarm clock commands me to. Then, in the Q&A session, I will respond to each question with a main clause, a book title, or a single word. Logistically, this is undoubtedly a rare stroke of luck from an event perspective. Still, I may also successfully spice up the content's brevity — now that you'll have to judge for yourself.
In anticipation of this lecture, I thought, for the sake of drama, it would be nice if a screen displayed a countdown, such as 29:10, 29:09, and so on — and, if you’d mind, please join together with me in the countdown as we approach its finale. And while I'm at it, keeping in mind the psychophysical [Psychophysik]9 Art of Elocution: I'd welcome having a device which every second would payout in coinage a relevant quantum of honorarium — so that after my final, monosyllabic contribution to the Q&A discussion, I'd be wandering off with a sack of loose change. Perhaps that’d be a bit burdensome, but I’d have the pleasure of seeing the equivalence of every single one of my thoughts accumulate before my very eyes. What's more, assuming that such an apparatus exists, I could easily pause during my lecture so I can visualize for you the falling sound of so many attentional quanta tokens of time, which, paradoxically, reflects the translation from time to money and from money to time — and has the fortunate side-effect that I can let these two forms of conversion speak for themselves: with myself remaining silent. Basically — if you’ll take my lecture’s theme as: Time is Money is Time — then, with this apparatus, everything that can be said has already been thematized. Therefore, anything I have to say beyond this is redundantly superfluous. And, as they say in political economics, if I were a more economical actor, I could ask you to get a beer and some munchies, perhaps while the organizer puts on a commercial break between the lecture and the Q&A discussion. But instead, you see me here in a certain kind of embarrassment since I'm forced to serve out the rest of my time in front of you — but that's really only a question of politeness and not a matter of economic calculation — which leads me to continue talking and lecturing all the same.
So if we’re all ready to move into the superfluous register now, I'd like to familiarize you with some of my thinking that’s neither wholly thought through nor follows a conclusive chain of argumentation. First, it's my continual puzzlement and never-ending amazement over how money, the world's most generally excepted thing, is always taken personally. If I take money personally but at the same time insist on its universality, therein lies an incredible contradiction — a contradiction you encounter everywhere. Take the word: self-esteem. It is evident that when it comes to paying a service provider, sentiments aren’t considered. You’re not inclined to pay prices for services priced according to the provider’s feelings — after all, negotiating with someone whose narcissistic lunacy of self-worth demands presumptive, over-the-moon exaggerations of their service value would be difficult. Against this background, this notion of value seems like an oxymoronic division of economic crossover that Capitalism demands of us. Kant expressed this split when he said:
In the realm of purpose, everything either has a price or else it has dignity.
Although this divisional rift is evidently the constitutive raison d'être of our economic activity, it’s strangely peculiar when we look at it more closely. Because if we take the word's meaning as expressing valor, these two spheres are still undivided; value and dignity are one, as in pretium, where price and praise are one. If capitalism has engendered a split, it's the rifting between dignity and value. Since the one operating on the demand side here (strictly speaking, that’s you, who'll listen to me and ask questions later) won't be interested in my self-worth fantasies driving it up into the dizzying realms of the exaggerated; instead, you'll be interested in what it is about my self-esteem that can be objectified as a value rather than personal feelings. Self-esteem we learn that we get from work. While in the early Middle Ages, before the Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomat10], labor was understood as the toiling travails of the disinherited, we, who’ve introjected into ourselves the mechanical clock's punctuality and perfection,11 don't understand work as humiliating debasement, au contraire: it is our highest dignity. So what’s the reason to ask ourselves these questions about work? In Physics, it’s the abstract product of a theoretical equation: Force multiplied by Time12 —and in the formal sense, it often becomes no more than a kind of thetic social nonsense: the time you serve being productive. Now embarrassingly, you could save yourself this polite sitting and serving time (as long as it is one of those so-called repetitive labor activities) without further ado by, with a few lines of code, putting this work into a Machine’s working memory. Where it then runs without you – in what we euphemistically call rationalization – only that with this rationalization, it’s not only my work disappearing into the museum of work but my dignity and self-worth.
Force multiplied by time: this could also be called psychophysics. This formula contains an understanding of work that proportionally unfolds over time. Force multiplied by Time yields a product — and the more time and effort you are required to invest in it, the more expensive it becomes. That is the meaning of the formula: Time=money. The midwife of the Capitalist model is undoubtedly the mechanical clock. If we want to call it as such, Capitalism’s operating system is moving well into the days of Taylorism13. Now our operating system is changing. Our window on the world is no longer the Central Perspective [Zentralperspektive]14 or the Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomat]; now it's called Windows; our instruments are no longer hardware driven by sudorific, corporeal power plants, but by airy stuff called Software, Smart Agents, and the Electromagnetic Phantasms we've put into the world and that we work to control. An old philosophical distinction speaks of actual and potential, or as we could just as well say: virtual content. In actu, putting it that way, you’re no longer running the program, but it’s running itself. We’ve become accustomed to seeing the medium of data carriers as extensions of our possibilities and potency — but the mirror-inverted perspective is no less apt. Because economically speaking, the act performed by a Machine is already devalorized. If any idiot can do it, it's worth nothing — although, crucially, this devaluation of work increases a product's mass social value and appeal. Because viewed as a product, it makes no difference whether a book page was created with lead type or with Pagemaker — even though the lead type-setter is confronted with his replaceability by the Machine — and that this highly-skilled craftsmanship is now regarded as unworthy (even by those who don't understand the slightest thing about it). The surplus value arises only there, where what is currently produced is supplemented by its increase spreading over into the virtual. Or in other words: the surplus value arises beyond the Machine, where a job’s work isn't Machine-substitutable. (This coincides with the Marxian thought: surplus value is created only by man, as Marx said in his deep contempt for money or better: he preached this). Thus, surplus value arises in Imagination; it’s imaginative power [Einbildungskraft], its powering [Kraft]15 that forms itself in hardware, informs itself, and imagines itself in the Word. If we take this thought as a thesis, a modern formulation of labor would have to be: Labor is Imagination multiplied by Time.
However, the question immediately arises here: what is the time metric of Imagination’s Power? How can a thought quanta be measured that’s imagining things? Here we come to that essential rift running through our post-industrial society — whereby I translate industria as old-fashioned diligence. The time of psychophysics, when you physically exhausted yourself from burning your heels and running in circles (although the last may already be the beginning of its ending), is heteronomous to Imagination’s Power. But, in particular: the proportionality of force and time, which was valid in the world of psychophysics, has lost its meaning here. While transporting goods always make progress if you invest force and time, it’s much more complicated in the case of the Imagination. Here it can be that all diligence is in vain. You can’t imagine very much on persistence, diligence, and punctuality alone – and in this respect, you are now working with secondary virtues. Now, I don't want to speak of a screwed-up, exalted idea of genius here — as if it were a matter of sudden inspirational whispers around the genius who’s haunted by a higher power, as in the case of spiritual work. No, I'd point out that instead, the basic formula of psychophysics is no longer valid, that the Imagination’s time isn’t continuous, but it’s fissured with diachronic ups and down — disturbing any notions of synchronizing Time and Imagination16. Unlike in the psychophysical field, where force is noted in horsepower, we don’t have a measurement of Imagination Power. And perhaps here lies the real reason for the dilemma that's afflicted post-industrial societies’ unemployment problem: their lack of imagination.
Contrasting Force and Imagination (or, more precisely, understanding Imagination Power as an economic factor) is a highly fruitful endeavor — not least because its parallelism, in its turn, opens the view to analogies. If you take a lunar perspective and look at the world of psychophysics, valid since the 13th/14th century, you will see that characteristic of this period is the removal of remoteness, the overcoming of spatial distances: what is commonly called logistics. And already we’ve been living in a state of globalization since the introduction of telegraphy in the 19th century, or to be more precise: a constant shrinkage of spatial distances - which brought the physicists to the formulation of the World State. Consequently, distances are the least of these distribution and network channel problems. Now communication with others is much more complicated than simply transporting goods. Logistics have been replaced by Psychologistics,17 that is, the issue of mediation: the question isn’t any longer just about physically getting a thought from point A to B, but intellectually mediating it. Isn't it true that this is a desideratum everywhere: the importance of making a product or service's appeal clear and acceptable to the consumer? Psychologistics is the decisive factor where the Consumer's Attention is a precious commodity that goods producers compete for. Admittedly, this terrain is no less dark than the trade routes of our ancestors. But, while they had to face the adversities of the oceans, and the inscrutable imponderables of foreign cultures, naming just a few, the terra incognita is now the consumer's psyche. It isn't apparent what touches them — and their psyche is a much darker, more complicated continent than previously presumed. The material ways may have shrunk, but there are not any fewer barriers and resistances, only that they've been put in the consumer’s head. Where once was the outer world now lies the inner world of phantasm, requiring Psychologistics and Imagination Power to penetrate and navigate this unknown continent.
This may seem a little dark, like news from another world. But what I am talking about (even if it's the superfluous part of my talk) isn't in the least bit luxurious, but touches on what I know about economics. Perhaps one of the problems obscuring our view of this profound change is that the process — which goes hand in hand with devaluing what you might understand as value — has more or less unconsciously taken hold of our minds. This is why I'd like to briefly examine 1968, the year of the revolution when the Paris students' protest motto significantly was: L'imagination au pouvoir, Imagination to Power. Now, 1968 is known for a series of revolutions that have more or less been forgotten but, in my opinion, represent milestones. 1968 was the year when brain death was defined as the time of death, the year software trading began. It was also the prelude to that great unleashing of the old Allied Nations — later known as Bretton Woods — when they abandoned the gold standard and materiality. In general terms, we can say that society was moving into a state of free-floating at this time; that things, time, and labor were dissolving; that they were becoming software. At that time, Joseph Beuys18 talked about explaining pictures to the dead rabbit, but above all: that everyone was an artist – and that's precisely what the sparrows are whistling from the rooftops today. We live in an age of the creative. You only have to turn on the TV or analyze XYZ's garbage, and you know: Imagination is in power. There is no other way to explain this particular (and I mean: highly economic and monetary) phenomenon. However, what in the artist’s anthroposophical social utopia meant a dissolution of man's boundaries as his liberation, his freedom; has today taken on the character of almost that of a threat. Imagination’s Power has become a means to an end, and we can now speak of an obsessive compulsion for aestheticization.
Where Imagination’s Power reigns, you may think we live in a world of intellectual goods. That’s easy to say but challenging to understand when something is invisible and immaterial – when it’s a something we can’t get a fix on as physical goods. Because our idea of what has value is obsoletely fixed to the ontic; to that which exists; to that which can be grasped with the hands — rather than grasping what’s mentally distant in the shortest possible route within the Psychologistic realm. This is, in no small part, also linked to a society's experiences of scarcity. Unfortunately, the world of psychophysics isn’t so easily shaken off. So, at this point, I would like to introduce you to an all too underestimated — perhaps even, we could say, a forgotten and misunderstood economist by the whole world: Sigmund Freud. As you know, Freud thought about the economics of wit. Now, suppose you take this reference to economics as emphasizing the central parameter and not as an aside; his teaching opens up as the joke of economics — or better yet, the economics of the joke. For the joke is the ideal Capitalist goods. Once told, its full power unfolds — and is immediately destroyed. The joke is a commodity that ensures its self-destruction with its appearance – because it’s not particularly funny hearing a joke a second time around — and, at the same time, it achieves what all refrigerator manufacturers have always dreamt of: it creates a demand for another new joke. It is a hot commodity that burns itself up in it’s sexiness. In this sense, the joke (like a mathematical formula) has a maximum time density. It is the compression of a complex relationship to a formula.
If we take the joke as the prototype of capitalist commodity production, it is easy to see that any commodity production that follows this logic must conform to a form of joke economy.
We don't need to look far to be convinced of this economic doctrine's validity. If products can now be sold through their suggestive power, their aura, their flair, it is because the Imagination’s Power has long been enthroned here.
But this brings us to this economy's dilemma. It isn't by any means easy to crack jokes. The joke is funny when it reduces a highly complex psychological context into a condensed form because it can connect distant mental regions psychologistically in the shortest possible way — so it's plausible that the call for even more jokes means hard work. As an aside, I remember when Tagesschau announced television producer Michael Pfleghaar’s death. That was still at a time when the public broadcasters cultivated statesman-like tones — and there, after this news, the good Eva Hermann announced that Michael Pfleghaar had many outstanding lifetime accomplishments, but above all because he produced the series Junk — and that was genuinely a strange moment. A friend standing next to me, who belongs to the dying breed of the educated citizen, said in horror: Imagine you're standing in front of Peter, and he asks you what you did in your life on earth – and all you can reply is Junk.
What’s ultimately at stake is that when work goes to our heads, it's no longer a matter of force but of the Power of Imagination. The term (which goes back to the strict Kant but has deeper roots in the theology of Meister Eckhart, that is, in the late Middle Ages) is helpful insofar as it includes the world of the phantasm: the world of desires, dreams, and the like. This says working on the phantasm is also work, that dreams, insofar as they’re produced and distributed in dream factories, are considered and negotiated in the field of economics. Here we come to the next point. The greatest paradox, and simultaneously the most significant dilemma of Imagination’s Power, is it isn't apparent whether its outcome is good or bad in advance. Even a failure — and we owe this thought to Freud — can be an achievement. And because the good can be wrong and the wrong can be good, we’re dealing with a revaluation of all values, not because the philosopher announces this from the nether regions of icy cold thought, but because it’s precisely consumers who operate their remote control to produce what’s delivered to them free of charge. And these products of an unleashed Power of Imagination have exceeded anything even the most audacious fantasy could have imagined a few years back. Friendly Lieschen Müller [aka Jane Consumer] and her ex, the blissful Otto Normalverbraucher [aka Joe Q. Normal], both turn out by no means to be predictable, standardized consumers; instead, they are polymorphously perverse beings — beings in which the collective unconscious pulsates. Here lies the caesura that unhooks the economy of the imagination from the past. Take, just as an example, Marx's idea of use-value. This is the notion that a utility is incorporated in things, that they are goods for something specific and have utility. Behind this, as a basic hidden assumption — practical utilitarianism and the idea of progress in Modernity. Now value is also formed when something completely useless, superfluously redundant; when seemingly pointless junk is produced: thus, also letting abuse become a use value — meaning it’d be just as permissible to speak of an abuse value (which, if you turn on your television in the afternoon and see all the deplorable victims, converting their abuse into clinking coins, represent a tried and tested thought tool). In general, it can be said: under the rubric of Imagination’s Power, we aren’t confronted with what an economist calls goods but with what we value and appreciate — meaning that: we are faced with ourselves, our perversions, aberrations, our dichotomies.
I've said that we take money personally but, simultaneously, it's also the most general thing in the world – that tertium comparationis which takes care of the metamorphosis of things into other things, of phantasms into other phantasms. Having said that: this is the disturbing thing about our present state of affairs – money, too, is afflicted by the vertigo of Imagination’s Power. With the abandonment of the gold standard, money has detached itself from that material order that has slowly, haltingly, and with great effort emerged since the 14th century — and this is precisely what was intellectually accomplished with the end of the Bretton Woods system. So insofar the end of Bretton Woods does not merely end the gold reserve backing, but (as I would say much more comprehensively) the world of the Wheelwork automaton, the operating system of psychophysics in general.
But what was the function of this gold backing? Gold was the equivalent of scarcity; it said our wealth could not be extended at will. Gold was the limiting factor that regulated this not-at-will-extension function — while, on the other hand, the sovereign, the central bank, whose role was to ensure the hardness of the coin (and its existence), was reflected this in an appropriate form. While there are still central banks in this state of free-floating, there’s no authoritative instance which is capable of curbing the signs anymore. Free-floating money, if you will, represents something like a circulating libido. If an object of desire beckons from somewhere, Capital docks itself there, hoping for some miraculous self-propagation – which has led us to the Bubble Economy Abyss, a global froth whose bubbles collapse more or less at infrequent intervals. Generally, it’s when voices of lamentation and visions of doom are raised; the question is then asked if a substitute hasn’t been found for the scarcity that gold used to create. The answer is a simple yes. Here, once again, the Imagination’s Power plays the predominant role. More precisely, its general expression is Attention — that is, my state of sensory stimulation, which expresses the extent something has seized my Power of Imagination. Producers of some goods may struggle to show me how good their product is; I'm free to direct my attention to them – or not. If a goods ignites my attention, I’ll dwell on it – if not, then I won’t. In the Supermarket’s surplus of absolute overproduction, the only thing that can’t be duplicated is my time and attention. It isn’t any wonder that a real battle for the consumer's attention has arisen that Georg Franck speaks of an economy of attention. Perhaps this lecture’s title is now becoming more plausible to you with the apparent economic logic behind its seemingly playful title. Unlike Classical Capitalism, which transforms the Wheelwork Automaton’s time into money (by finding in gold the inhibition keeping its operating system from idling), money no longer represents a physical value. It’s the consumer's limited amount of time that becomes the Capital at stake. Knowing this, the calculation of absurd gifting campaigns then becomes understandable – like the offer of letting me make free phone calls if I’m willing to put up with so many commercials.
But the production question is more interesting to me than the question of consumption — and perhaps that's just a personal quirk. Here I'm fascinated by the field opening up to Imagination Power. Insofar as the computer can store an engram of my work and recall any action, including arbitrarily complex activities from its working memory: I'm also capable of creating highly complex processes in the machine, ones I'd never be able to accomplish freehand. This fact alone marks an incredible revolution. The concept of work (which for a long time has been dividing itself into ever more ramified, constricted activities) is suddenly experiencing an unbelievable expansion. Equipped with the computer, as a Universal Machine, fields of activity can again be brought together that previously only could have been accomplished by social groupings built on a division of labor. In other words: If the social confines, the jealous guild guardians, secrecy mongers, and compartmentalization specialists have held back my Imagination’s Power, the free-floating of information allows for an unparalleled expansion of my thoughts and practices.
If there’s only talk about labor market problems today, it seems it’s really about a lack of Imagination Power. In our fixation on psychophysics, we haven't considered this resource yet. It might have been more appropriate if, instead of giving you this thoroughly redundant lecture, I’d left you alone with my Machine. But, on the other hand, such a rational approach would have deprived me of the pleasure, of which is perhaps the highest. That possibly one or the other of you would have gladly listened to me and approved not merely of my value, but of my dignity.
Thank you for your attention.
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Burckhardt, M. – Digitale Metaphysik. Merkur, No. 472, May, 1988. [Translator’s note]
Burckhardt, M. – Im Arbeitsspeicher – Zur Rationalisierung geistiger Arbeit. In: König, H., von Greiff, B., Schauer, H. (eds) Sozialphilosophie der industriellen Arbeit. LEVIATHAN Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, vol 11. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, January 1990. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-01683-0_15. [Translator’s note]
Burckhardt, M. – Die Universale Maschine – Merkur, No 501 12/1990. [Translator’s note]
Burckhardt, M. – Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, Frankfurt/M, 1994. [Translator’s note]
Burckhardt, M. – Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche, Frankfurt/M, 1999. [Translator’s note]
The Sachbuch Bestenliste [Non-fiction leaderboard] is a monthly list of ten non-fiction books in Germany, created in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ZDF, and Die Zeit. [Translator’s Note]
Franck, G. – Die neue Währung: Aufmerksamkeit – Zum Einfluß der Hochtechnik auf Zeit und Geld, Merkur, No. 486, 8/1989.
Time is Money is Time is a lecture Martin gave to a private group in response to a request for a presentation on Time shortly after the publication of Vom Geist der Maschine in 1999 (ibid). [Translator’s note]
The Psychophysical [Psychophysik], as noted in the introduction, is a red thread of Martin’s central leitmotif woven across his thought labyrinth as an unconscious of the Unconscious, which is an outsourcing of the Universal Machine into its Social Drive [Triebwerk]. This notion is first mentioned in chapter 6 of Metamorphosen Raum und Zeit (ibid.), again in chapter 7 of Vom Geist der Maschine (ibid.), and now here. In chapter 10 of Philosophie der Maschine, he notes this as the moment of self-enchantment in Greek pre-history when the Machine succeeds in inscribing itself as an introject into the minds of men — which he’ll name the Psychotope (as a mirroring of the Biotope) in his lecture on Alien Logic; after which he lays out its detail in a chapter of Die Fremde (2nd book of the Psychology of the Machine series, to be published). See Burckhardt, M. – Philosophie der Maschine,Berlin, 2018. [Translator’s note]
The Medieval Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomat] is part of a significant leitmotif spanning Martin’s thought labyrinth. While it begins in his first essay, his true eloquence starts in the first few pages of Metamorphosen, to which the reader is referred for the complete account. Here, he’s referring to how work/labor became mechanized in the Middle Ages, as exemplified by the gear train automaton of the mechanical clock as laid out in the first chapter of Metamorphosen. See Burckhardt, M. Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, (ibid). [Translator’s note]
Here Martin refers to how the ticking, gear-driven mechanical clock of the Middle Ages becomes outsourced as the Social Drive [Gesellschaftstriebwerk] with its characteristic mechanical, irritable “nervous timing” which synchronizes social order into productivity —turning Time into Money into Time, described in chapter 6 of Metamorphosen (ibid), as the that age’s Universal Machine, while in this lecture he’s describing how it’s shifting over to Modernity’s third Universal Machine — that of the oscillating Digitalwerk. [Translator’s note]
Note the mechanical definition of work is force*distance (W=f*s), but when force is transformed into power (as in Wattage or Horsepower), the formula becomes P=W/t; algebraically, this becomes W=F*t — where force is considered as power. Also to be considered is in the shrinkage of digital metaphysics, distance becomes a moot point in a computer’s spatiality — meaning, unlike in real-world spatiality, the distance between point A and point B has become so small that it becomes essentially transformed into power, leaving just time in place of space, thus Work=F*T here too. [Translator’s note]
Frederick W. Taylor, an American mechanical engineer and one of the first management consultants; he’s known for his The Principles of Scientific Management widely regarded basis of industrial engineering and scientific management – sometimes referred to as Taylorism; he is also known for his assertion that there is no skilled work and all work should be analyzed the same way. [Translator’s note]
Central Perspective [Zentralperspektive] is another essential leitmotif in Martin’s thought labyrinth tracing its meaning from the central perspective of mediation, and the equative rationalizing of the equation’s equal sign which he began tracing in Metamorphosen (ibid) from Cathedral building, Oresme’s theory on money and the mechanical perspective of Renaissance painters; then through Vom Geist der Maschine (ibid) where the geometric mapping of x,y, and z coordinates within computer spatiality is no longer powered by the Wheelwork [Räderwerk] — but by the oscillating Digital Drive [Digitalwerk] of digitalisation that he’s referring to here. This thread continues in Philosophie der Maschine (ibid), picking up on Bentley’s panopticon and on through the Psychology of the Machine series as the Avatar. [Translator’s note]
Martin has been tracing Einbildungskraft [Power of Imagination] since Digitale Metaphysik (ibid). It’s essentially noting how the Power of Imagination makes Imagination the Kraftwerk [Power House/Engine] powering all of the Universal Machine’s Triebewerke [Social Drives] — thus the potency of our Humanity. [Translator’s note]
If the mechanical philosophy asserts the homogeneity of time and space, the Space of Imagination (like electromagnetic space) knows force fields and discontinuities. That means one must inevitably understand the spiritualization of the time-space concept. This is the Knisternden Zeitriss that Martin will further define in the Psychology of the Machine series. [Translator’s note]
Psychologistics is how Martin names Modernity’s Psychotope here as he explores the differences from its predecessor, that of psychophysics. This difference is we now live in a psychologized world, the one Nietzsche announced as the end of Philosophy (notably long before Heidegger) when he declared himself the first psychologist. What’s essential here is this is the starting thread in Martin’s thought labyrinth which will be relieved-out as the Psychology of the Machine, beginning in Über dem Luftmeer. See fn. 9 above and Burckhardt, M – Über dem Luftmeer: Unbehagen in der Moderne, Berlin, 2023. [Translator’s Note]
This a reference to a piece of performance art titled How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare [Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder eklärt] staged by Joseph Beuys in 1965. [Translator’s note]