Text page
WRAP THESIS Mandarini 1998
"WRAP THESIS Mandarini 1998" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 43
" (G p203) The circulation of commodities within capitalism is the condition of the circulation of money, but the circulation of money repeats on another plane the organisation of production: that of the division of labour, labour-power abstraction, etc., as does in another form commodity circulation.
Definition · paragraph 34
The U-V of the product/ commodity is transformed, into a concrete instantiation of the virtuality of E-V as all commodities: realised price as the actualisation of a 40 This is not to deny the possibility of bad investments - capitalist control is a project, not an essence. The complexity of a system such as that of capitalism also involves disturbances to the calculating and visual mind such that it is forced to also make hallucinatory qualities functional (this is especially obvious in the financial markets).
Definition · paragraph 15
As Marx says, bourgeois economics does not falsely describe the capitalist Assemblage: 17 "They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i. e. commodity production.
Mechanism · paragraph 51
" (G p267) Marx retains the opposition in order to describe the fracture within the capital structure, which thereby opens the phenomenal space of commodity relations, i. e. the concretion of the capitalist abstract-machine in the assemblages which effectuate its strategy. Capital-labour is fundamentally an intensive continuum (material-abstraction), a differential system which produces and enables the organisation of zones of conjugation.
History · paragraph 2
Efficient Material-Abstraction: Towards a Critical Materialist Pragmatics Matten Mandarini Submitted for PhD. Qualification University of Warwick Department of Philosophy August 1998
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.