adapting personae, drifting further and further from our true selves and even from the ability to recognize that such a self might exist. As a result, we feel depressed, unmotivated, hollow, and, since we live so deeply inside the spectacle,
we experience this feeling as a personal failure, thus discounting our true selves even further.37
Just as the mind differentiated itself from the object, and then leapt outside itself only to then turn upon itself in order to regard itself as an object (when the subject of the mind becomes an object of the mind’s study), so too does this introduction of perspective (the mind’s eye turning upon itself, appropriating not only external objects but also itself) lend credence to the belief it is but one world, given meaning by the one mind, where things or objects are really thought things, products of the mind. We can, through our mind and the products created by our mind, literally look back upon ourselves objectively, through the lens of the mind’s eye, and transcend time and space by becoming that very thing in time and space. As such, this should answer the question posed by Peter Gordon: “Did Marx allow for variations in time and space?”38 Of course he did.
By adding the fourth dimension, Marx was able to claim capitalist man was the variety of the objects he produces. He sees the world from the objects he produces and finds his identity – however false that identity may ultimately be – from the perspective of his product. As Einstein would discover and later characterize the experience of the fourth dimension, capitalist man would see himself through and forms his identity from the perspective of whatever product he has produced (his tree, his ball, his car, his pot, his economic system, his religion, his means of production) — literally from the light particle he happens to be riding at that moment.
Moreover, when viewed as a bundle of energy, man’s product – whether physical or mental – is a collection of mental energy that finds stasis in a particular form or product until labor moves upon it through the means of production to remake it into another form or product. However, as products of labor, man and his creations remain the same thing: a bundle of energy in stasis, which comes to have value (or meaning) in terms of labor-time. This is not such a far-fetched idea. Though not specifically directed at Marx or Marxism, William Goetzmann, in his book entitled Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible, recognized how money and finance are intimately tied to time. Goetzmann stated, “in essence, financial technology is a time machine.”39 Or, as Felix Martin stated in a review of Goetzmann’s book, it is a “set of ideas and practices that enable us to shift economic value backward and forward through time.”40
The Marxian scholar David Harvey also has interesting things to say on this matter. For example, in his lecture on “Visualizing Capital,” he notes that “capital is moving at very different speeds” and the question becomes how you align different temporalities (e.g., the fact cotton is produced but once a year but cotton mills need a steady supply of cotton throughout the year, or how does someone account for the circulation of fixed capital like buildings)? Harvey argues that what Marx does in Volume II is effectively “disaggregate temporality.” He notes that the credit system, which attempts to resolve some of the inherent problems in capital that causes disruptions in the system functioning efficiently, “actually creates a standardization of time and temporality.”
Moreover, in Volume II, Marx states that there is the “contradictory unity” between production and realization (first articulated in The Grundrisse), and that you can’t understand capital without understanding that contradictory unity between production and realization.
Why? It is precisely because the realization aspect of it is also precisely “where the space and time starts to come in – the temporality.” This is important in the production of human nature and in the reproduction of human wants, needs, and desires. Returning to the image of capital not being a cycle but an infinitely
88