To jump straight in: this book is a terrible read, at least it was for me. Admittedly, it was off to an immediately bad start when I read the opening lines "The main thesis of this book is; capitalization is a function of our genetic code" (p.2). Unfortunately, nothing that followed could redeem the book.

However, what is the general thesis? The above quoted opening line is followed by: "While I do not hold that Capital is 'physically' located in DNA I do believe that without some form of capitalization, Code cannot exist, that is, Code capitalizes upon an environment" which it does via monetary currencies that "are the praxis of the code" (p.2).

"The Code" that Ruiz refers to here, is not only the DNA; rather it "includes DNA, but also its surrounding micro and macro-milieu effects." (p.15) "The Code" needs to thrive on its environment and in the human body it thrives via our needs and wants which we satisfy through Capital. So Ruiz comes to the conclusion that "the impetus for a general economy is the base replicative protocol of a capitalizing Code.[…] Whereas Dawkins holds that living forms are vessels for genes, I would say that more precisely, living forms are vessels by, for and of Code" (pp.17,18, original emphasis).

Enough said. The rest of the book is an elaboration on this characterization. Overall, it seems to me that it is Ruiz himself who is the victim of a ghost that he created, because to conceive of the workings of "the Code" as a "capitalization" sounds to me like an anthropomorphism, or at least sheer metaphor, or, alternatively, to keep the tone of the book, surely a result of "the Code". Everything is subsumed to this view mainly because "the Code" is such a broad concept and everything is defined in relation to it. This must be "the Code's" workings.

Less sarcastically, it is true that a code cannot exist in a vacuum, it can only be a code in relation to something, but the environments we are talking about here are surely different ones, and so are the codes. The bio-chemical code of our DNA exists and develops within a biological environment suitable for it (i.e. the Earth and the biological conditions on it). Capital, however, is a code of a very different kind (is it actually a code at all?): it is no biological code but a theoretical entity, a product of our imagination and therefore a contingent concept of our evolved brains.

Thus, when the back of the book reads "Like the genetic Code, our identification of it [Capital] did not make it so; make it exist, as it were […] the Code preceded our conception of it" surely, this is simply wrong. Capital did not exist before humans started to deal in monies. We made it by making up rules (constitutive rules, see Searle, 1995) and following them.

Ruiz's approach is faced with two problems: not only is this an untenable reduction of a theoretical concept to a natural basis, but it also amounts to a transcendentalization of capital. That is, capital is taken out of our hand; it is not a construction of humans anymore but something we cannot influence and controls us as the DNA does.

Additionally to the (kindly expressed) problematic analysis, the book is also written in an absolutely inaccessible style. An already tenuous theory should not be furthermore overburdened with unnecessarily complicated language, but sentences such as: "If the ancients witnessed the birth of Deity, history brings us now to the point where we bear witness to the slow implosion of Deity, coupled to the robotic emergence of immersive victories of imperial, global transcendence; illustrated by the global fireworks of the last paroxystic gasp of fundamentalist spectacle, all awash in, and giving way to the operational illusion of postmodern replicative production and postindustrial service economy reproduction" (p.58) simply are.

Sentences like these abound including an array of made-up terminology (such as: biotic production, media bio-synthesis, biocapital, mediaopolis, metacodes, metalanguage, metapolitics, biochemical discontents), which drastically hinders comprehending a thesis which is faced with considerable problems from the outset.

Unsurprisingly we also find a classic philosophical mistake: the is-ought gap. That is, Ruiz starts his investigation like an analysis of facts and somehow, in the final pages, derives claims about how it ought to be and what we should do in order to get there. But, apart from the missing middle piece here, after reading the book I want to ask, how can we act against "the Code"?

Lastly, this book simply runs together several different lines of argument within and from different areas of enquiry. Ruiz talks about politics, economy, ethics, bioethics, metaphysics, ontology, the media, anthropology, history, etc. The claims are generalized and abstracted in order to create an even more general and abstract theory. Interdisciplinary research is certainly to be commended, but only if plausibility is maintained. More importantly, it is difficult to see how an analysis on such a level of abstraction is meant to offer any explanatory insights. I, for one, could not detect any.

© 2007 Ulrich Mühe

Ulrich Mühe is currently a PhD student at the University of Kent (U.K.). His research interests lie in epistemology, social philosophy (particularly social ontology), phenomenology, and psychology.

Categories: Philosophical