Do Androids Dream of Surplus Value?

Kjosen |1 Do androids dream of surplus value? (Mediations 2.5, Feb. 18, 2012) By Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, PhD Candidate Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario. (SLIDE 2) Androids, if they were to come into existence (bar an alien invasion scenario), would be the outcome of scientific and engineering ingenuity and thus be products of past living labour. Although the androids might be Turing-compatible, Voight-Kammpf cheating and Asimov-law abiding, they would be dead labour. As outcomes of a capitalist production process they would be commodities, objectifying a quantity of value and have particular uses for business and repression, domestic life, comfort or pleasure. In other words, androids would be very advanced machinery and Marx is quite clear that machinery cannot be a source of fresh value. He states that: (SLIDE 3) Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the product it serves to beget. In so far as the machine has value and, as a result, transfers value to the product, it forms an element in the value of the latter (Marx, 1976:509). Based on Marx’s value theory and his conceptualization of machinery, it appears as if no exploration of the topic is needed. Categorically, machines cannot create value. Marx argues that only living labour, or variable capital, can create new value. Indeed, that value is created by living is axiomatic. While androids may be extremely flexible in use as a means of production or in individual consumption, they would not possess the use-value that makes human labour-power so unique: being a source of value that is greater than its own value (1976:301). While an android could be productively consumed, just like labour-power, it cannot perform valuecreating labour; instead it yields up its own value piecemeal to the end product. The android, just Kjosen |2 like the machine, would be a means for producing relative surplus value and cheapen commodities (1976:492), but not for the creation of fresh value. Value creation belongs to the human domain. Vitalist theories, such as those of Louie Pasteur, Niels Bohr, Henri Bergson or Hans Driesch to name a few, rest on an essential difference between what life and non-life; there is a vital ‘spark’ or élan vital that only living beings have. Living entities are governed by different principles than inanimate things. Marx’s value theory is underscored by a radical difference between life and non-life, subject and object, and it is the capacity to create value that is the source of the difference. Marx connects value with life and he could, arguably, be considered a vitalist theorist. Marxists such as Benjamin Noys and Dipesh Chakrabarty have noted the “vitalism that runs through and within Marx’s work” specifically in the figure of ‘living labour’ (Noys 2011:10). This paper will explore whether androids or artificially intelligent robots can create surplus value. I will consider Marx vitalist humanism, and whether there must be a categorical or logical link between value and life, or value and so-called human beings. In order to do this I will be drawing on John Johnston’s (2008) examination of artificial life from his excellent Allure of Machinic Life. Particularly interesting is artificial life researchers’ understanding of life that focuses on how life is, rather than what it is. Because asking “what” leads down the path of vitalism and an affirmation of the human as the touchstone of life, and, important for this paper, features such as consciousness and imagination, the how question is much more productive to interrogate both life and value. I first consider Marx’s vitalism, and then the android from the point of view of the labour process and valorization process before suggesting that under certain conditions androids can in Kjosen |3 fact produce value. These conditions have nothing to do with the peculiarity of either Man or machine, but rather with what value is and how it functions in Marx’s theoretical framework. Although Marx could be charged with vitalism, I will conclude that this aspect of his theory can be understood as referring to the life of capital, and that in this context labour is negentropic to capital’s entropy. Das Kapital and Grundrisse are replete with passages where the vitalist thematic is connected to value; and, of course, Marx consistently refers to human labour as ‘living labour,’ which for Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007:60) is the vitalist thread that runs through Marx’s body of work. Although Marx may be using vitalistic language and analogies complementary to his biological metaphors, such as those he invokes to describe the circulation of commodities as a metamorphosis or social metabolism, the examples are too many to just be literary flair. In order to make the connection between value and life it is therefore worthwhile to examine some passages that are arguably vitalist. They are mainly taken from Grundrisse. On discussing the use value of labour-power, i.e. living labour, Marx writes that (SLIDE 4) it “exists as the worker’s specific, productive activity; it is his vitality itself” (1973:287, emphasis added). (SLIDE 5) “This commodity exists in [the worker’s] vitality” and the capitalist pays the worker for the “amount of objectified labour contained in his vital forces” (Marx 1973:323, emphasis added). (SLIDE 6) The wage is necessary to maintain the workers vitality (Marx 1973:324). On the other hand, the capitalist “likes nothing better than for him to squander his dosages of vital force as much as possible” (Marx 1973:294, emphasis added). And in beautiful prose, Marx writes: (SLIDE 7) “Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy” raw material and means of production are transformed into commodities (Marx 1976:289-90). (SLIDE 8) In the process of Kjosen |4 production, the “worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object” (Marx 2007:70). On the uniqueness of the labour-power commodity because it can be reproduced Marx repeats the vitalist imagery; for this reproduction, the worker needs the (SLIDE 9) “necessaries with which to stoke the flame of living labour capacity, to protect it from being extinguished, to supply its vital process with the necessary fuels” (Marx 1973:461, emphasis added). There are more examples (SLIDES 10, 11, 12, 13), and I am sure there are even more scattered throughout the volumes of Capital. Based on this array of quotations, it is clear that that Marx is linking value to the vitality of the worker, indeed that this vitality can be “used up”, as happens in Victorian sewing houses and 21st century sweat shops in the global south. Although he may just be stating that labourpower is embodied, value as linked to labour can therefore also be seen as something physiological: “labour is also consumed by being employed, set into motion, and a certain amount of the worker’s muscular force etc. is thus expended, so that he exhausts himself.” In Capital, Marx refers to labour as (SLIDE 14) “a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles etc.” (Marx 1976:164). He also writes that: “all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in the physiological sense, and it is this quality of being equal as abstract labour that it forms the value of commodities” (Marx 1976:137). However, Marx’s vitalism should not be confused with a physiological definition of value as some orthodox, Engels-inspired Marxist do with reference to Marx’s usage of the term ‘substance of value,’ not understanding that this refers to Aristotle’s metaphysics rather than physiology. In this view, expenditure of muscle and brainpower is ‘translated’ through kinetic energy and becomes the value in the individual commodity that an individual worker produces. Kjosen |5 If that were the case a political economist come chemist would be able to discover value in pearls and diamonds, and consequently that value is a part of the object itself (Marx 1976:177). Nothing could be more fetishistic than that. It is not the concrete, physiological expenditure that is the substance of value, but the duration of labour as abstract activity. This abstraction occurs during exchange, as the measure of socially necessary labour time in prices, and the reduction of all particular, concrete labours, such as spinning and computer programming to equal human, i.e. abstract, labour. (SLIDE 15) And Spiderman has been telling us this at least since the 1980s! The substance of value is thus labour, social labour, and its measure is socially necessary labour time. Hence, against the physiological view, Marx stresses the social quality of value, i.e. abstract labour as “a relation of social validation” (Heinrich 2012:50). I will return to the ontology of value later in this talk. Marx’s ‘vitalism’, however, is not a type of Cartesianism or a simply praise of life as vital spirit, although that argument can certainly be made based on the passages I just quoted. Rather it connects life with the potential to produce, specifically (SLIDE 16) in the figure of “living labour” and surplus population. This connection animates his theory of value and analysis of capitalism. Because Marx connects life with productive potential, capitalism has, from its inception, been biopolitical, which is something that autonomist Marxists have argued quite persuasively, in particular Silvia Federici (2004) in Caliban and the Witch. It is, however, beyond the scope of this talk to consider the biopolitical aspect of living labour. Marx’s vitalism can be connected to what he set out to do with the volumes of Capital. His objective was to immanently critique the categories of political economy and tell us the secret of the commodity fetish. In this context we can understand why he refers to labour as human labour, stresses the figure of living labour and why his political economy can be Kjosen |6 characterized as a vitalist humanism; he was setting himself apart from those economists that argued, quite fetishistically, that machinery, capital or the market could labour and/or create value. And he was correct to do so at the time, and still is. Nevertheless, a problematic implication of Marx’s vitalism is that it delineates the living from the non-living, and by extension what is not human and what is not productive of value is relegated to the same category. Animals are reduced to means of production (1973:717, fn *), to the same level as machinery; categorically they are identical. Interestingly, slaves would also fill up this category and be conceptually equivalent to animals in machines. Marx argues: “in the slave relation the worker is nothing but a living labour-machine, which therefore has a value for others, or rather is a value” (marx 1973:465). Animals, slaves and our potential future robot and android others belong, according to Marx’s value theory, to that same category. If machines cannot create value, neither can animals nor slaves (or for that matter housewives); everything that is other to labouring men is not a source of value. This reduction is problematic, though in the context of the argument I am making it is not primarily on a political or ethical level, but in terms of explanatory power. Marx, however, does recognize slaves as human. What Marx argues about slaves is that the mode of production necessitates the ontological reduction of slaves, animals and machines to the level of beings that are not capable of positing value. However, his understanding of the role of slaves in production provides a clue as to what value is and why androids could possibly create value: (SLIDE 17) “With kidnapping, slavery, the slave trade and forced labour, the increase of these laboring machines, machines producing surplus product, is posited directly by force; with capital, it is mediated through exchange” (Marx 1973:769). Kjosen |7 This is a key passage because Marx is indicating that being human or having the vital spark of a human is not the only condition for being able to create value. With the end of slavery huge swathes of slaves became ‘free’ wage labourers. In other words, slaves moved into the category of beings possible of value creation. Thus Marx argues that the condition for creating surplus value is exchange with capital. But before I get at why exchange with capital is a condition for the creation of fresh value, I first have to consider whether androids can labour because, as we know, the substance of value is labour. What if an android could do all the things that a human worker could do? What if an android could labour? If it could, then it is conceivable that the android could create value. Indeed, if that were the case the introduction of advanced forms of machinery like androids would not lead to capital’s dooms day scenario that Marx outlines in the (in)famous ‘Fragment on Machines’ (1973:690-712). For Marx, labour is nothing but “a process between Man and nature, a process by which man through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (1973:283). In this formulation androids could conceivably take the place of Man, as could even animals. Following Marx, however, it is not that simple. On labour he is very much a humanist. Indeed, he presupposes that labour is an exclusively human characteristic (1976:284). This characteristic Marx connects to the human being’s faculty of imagination and creativity, faculties that he sees as exclusive to humans. In the famous architects and bees passage, he writes: (SLIDE 18) A bee would put many a human architect to shame by construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which has already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not Kjosen |8 only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials (Marx 1976:284). This purpose is also something that the worker is conscious of, and accordingly Marx argues that labour is conscious, purposeful activity (Marx 1976:284); it is “living purposive activity” (Marx 1973:307). In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx (2007) spends some time on the difference between the human and the animal, a difference he argues comes from the fact that Man can take its ‘life activity’ as “an object of will and consciousness” (2007:75). And “conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity” (2007:75). The animal, and arguably all machines, is “immediately identical with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its lifeactivity” (2007:75). The life-activity of animals is, from what I can gather, simply how they live their lives and reproduce themselves; eating, drinking, fight or flight, and procreation. But for them these life-activities are not categories of knowledge and potential objects of science. Only beings that can think about how their life-activity, i.e. labour, can be differently organized are conscious of the production and reproduction of their life. As far as I know, no animal, other than homo sapiens, has come up with something as vile as Taylorism. (SLIDE 19) Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself and its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom (Marx 2007:75). For Marx the touchstone for labour is thus the human being. Indeed to labour is to be human because labouring “is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore… Kjosen |9 common to all forms of society in which human beings live” (1976:290). At this categorical level, animals and machines cannot usurp Man. However, Marx also argues that that the “use of labour-power is labour itself” (1976:283). Conceivably, something non-human that possesses labour-power could labour. Before I expand on this argument, I will first consider cyberneticists view on life, what John Johnston (2008) refers to as machinic life, and whether their cybernetic life forms can meet Marx’s requirement of conscious and purposeful human labour. In The Allure of Machinic Life, Johnston explores liminal machines associated with life, machines that exhibit “many of the behaviors that characterize living entities – homeostasis, selfdirected action, adaptability, and reproduction” (2008:1). In their behaviour these liminal machines mirror the behaviour associated with organic life, and they represent a different form of life that does not answer to the ontological priority of organic life (2008:1). The liminal machines Johnston refers to include (SLIDE 20) von Neumann’s self-reproducing automata, (SLIDE 21) Shannon’s maze-solving mouse, (SLIDE 22) Ashby’s self-organizing homeostat, (SLIDE 23) Walter’s artificial tortoises, (SLIDE 24) digital organisms mutating in virtual worlds, (SLIDE 25) Lucy the baby android, and (SLIDE 26) autonomous mobile robots and many more. Johnston argues that the cybernetic and artificial life researchers’ view on life focuses on ‘how’ life is rather than what life is. In cybernetics “the complexity of life is not attributed to some ineffable, mystical force, as in vitalism” (2008:31). Cyberneticians’ assumption is “that some aspect of a living organism’s behavior can be accounted for by a mechanism or mechanisms that can be modeled by a machine” (2008:31). Johnston’s focus, however, is on complex adaptive systems or non-linear dynamic systems. In these systems “highly beneficial K j o s e n | 10 collective or aggregate behaviors emerge that are not programmed into the individual agents” (2008:14) These behaviours are stochastic or chaotic; they cannot be predicted, but can be analyzed, or in the case of chaotic systems (SLIDE 27) modeled post-factum, such as with a Lorenz strange attractor. Do automata have an imagination? Can they be creative? Now we should not assume that if these automata cannot be as inventive or imaginative as humans, they are not creative. We are a long way from androids that think and behave like us, or at least can display a similar level of creativity and consciousness, but whether the human being should be the touchstone for concepts like imagination and creativity is beside the point. The point is that currently there are automata and software that do exhibit behaviours that can only be said to be creative or imaginative, even though their epistemes are far more limited than those of human beings considering they often have to rely on our scraps in limited databases for their learning and/or behaviour. For example, Google X’s neural network started (SLIDE 28) recognizing and could produce a composite image of a human face and the head of a cat because it was given 10 million stills from YouTube, and what we upload are videos of ourselves and cats (Clarke 2012). In other words, when the archive is in motion, as it always is with computational media, the archive becomes an archivist; the machine becomes a subject capable of creating categories of knowledge on their own as the media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst argues (see Parikka 2011; Ernst 2012). Some ALife researchers, such as Steve Grand, the creator of Lucy the baby android, argue that imagination is essential to the emergence of intelligence, which is why he makes Lucy sleep so that she can dream (Johnston 2008:400-408).. Although I really wanted to go into Grand’s Lucy project and why imagination is important, I unfortunately do not have the time to do the project justice. Instead, let us take a look at a few artificial life forms that exhibit K j o s e n | 11 behaviours that could be characterized as imaginative or creative. In this case, the creativity is computational. For example, the computer (SLIDE 29) Iamus can compose musical scores by algorithmically evolving an initial input; its only limitation in output is that it has to be playable by human beings Composing a piece takes it less than a second, though it takes it eight minutes to encode the composition into human-readable notations. It recently released its debut album containing ten compositions (Smith 2013). There is also the program (SLIDE 30) Angelina that through the techniques of cooperative co-evolution and refraction creates platform computer games by cannibalizing its own code. It can even take advantage of bugs in its own programming to create game elements or behaviors that its designers could not even think of (Aron 2012). A very interesting piece of software is the (SLIDE 31) Painting Fool, created by Simon Colton of Imperial College London. He argues that for software to be recognized as being creative it needs to exhibit behaviours that can genuinely be called skillful, appreciative and imaginative. The Painting Fool’s skillful behaviour is based on simulating the physical painting process, such as determine regions of colours by looking at digital photographs, regions which the software then abstracts from and change according to colour palettes, and simulating natural paints, pastels or pencils and their usage in outlining and filling regions. Its appreciative behaviour revolves around painting styles revolving around human emotions, and its imaginative behaviour “involve[s] the invention of visual objects and scenes that don’t exist in reality” (Painting Fool 2012). It can do this by using “evolutionary search to produce scenes with repeated elements in, and to produce abstract pieces of art” (Painting Fool 2012). Via its contextfree software, Painting Fool can construct visual objects such as trees and clouds with random variation, with no repeated image. K j o s e n | 12 In this context what is imagination or creativity? Arguably the products of Iamus or the Painting Fool are a results of a “creative” process or expression of how they live their life (they are their life-activity). But is it purposeful activity, and something that they are conscious of? While their labour processes could be considered creative, these automata are in possession of a stochastic or chaotic creativity. It is impossible for either the cybernetician or the machinic life form itself (by definition since its life is its behaviour) to predict what the automata will create, though it is possible to statistically analyse or model its behaviour after the fact. I suggest that creativity in the age of computation is at minimum a stochastic process. The products of these life forms might even be sold as a commodities (SLIDE 32), but it would not be the result of a labour-process strictly speaking because it is not a process the automata is conscious of, though it is conducted according to a purpose. While their activity might be living (following Johnston), it is not labour because it is not conscious. A cybernetic life form would then just be another machine, which cheapens commodities and is a means for producing relative surplus value. Whoever sets the automata in motion would be the living labourer, and would be the cause of any value creation in this peculiar but nevertheless capitalist production process. As mentioned initially, Marx is categorical about the impossibility of machinery creating value (SLIDE 33) “Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the product it serves to beget” (Marx 1976:509). In Grundrisse, Marx muddles the argument a bit. He writes that “machinery, produces value, i.e. increases the value of the product, in only two respects: (1) in so far as it has value… [and] (2) increases the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour” (1973:701) What Marx refers to, however, is not the creation of value, but merely the preservation of value objectified in machinery and the production of relative surplus value, which requires living labourers present in K j o s e n | 13 the production process. In other words, fixed capital is a source of value because labour time is stored in the object, in very much the same way as electricity is stored in a battery, and in so far as it allows living labour to increase its productivity. The machinery has part of its value transferred to the newly produced commodity by the worker during the production process. The longer a machine serves in the labour process and the more commodities are produced, the less value is transferred to the product. In other words, the machine enters only piecemeal, proportional to its depreciation, into the process of valorization (Marx 1976:509-512). That only living labour can create value, but machinery is vital for increasing the rate of exploitation and surplus value, is one of the contradictions that could lead to capital’s negation. The contradiction Marx explores in the Fragment on Machines is, of course, that production starts to depend more and more on the general state of science, and its application in technology or the ‘general intellect’. The result of this increasing dependence on technology is that human, living labour is pushed to the side of production and becomes a mere watchman or regulator. The ultimate consequence is that (SLIDE 34) the “theft of alien labour time… appears as a miserable foundation in the face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value of use value” (Marx 1973:705). Thus the outcome of the tendency of the “greatest possible negation of necessary labour” is that production based on capital breaks down, and the law of value ceases to function (Marx 1973:705-706). This robot apocalypse, bringing an end to the capitalist mode of production contrary to humanity, must be complete in all branches of production, or at least reach a critical mass across several branches of production. If there are still sufficient pockets of value-positing living labour, K j o s e n | 14 the capitalist mode of production will continue. Marx’s theory of profit, contra surplus value, opens up for this because in the form of profit and prices there need not be an exchange of equivalents. George Caffentzis (1990) has detailed how this could occur with self-reproducing automata. (SLIDE 35) “Commodities produced in spheres of high organic composition generally exchange above their value while commodities produced in spheres of low organic composition generally exchange below their value” (1990:41). The developed world with a completely automated production processes would suck surplus value from the developing world where living labour is still employed because the value of labour power is cheaper than the machinery to replace it, as the case is with China today (though increasingly less so). The same argument, however, can be applied between branches of production rather than across national or geographical boundaries so that a labour intensive sector, such as the North American service industry, can substitute for Caffentzis’ Africa. Bar the possibility of drawing surplus value from other circuits of capital, the only other resolution to capital’s demise as outlined in the ‘Fragment on Machines’ would be machinery capable of positing new value. For Marx, the machine is the culmination of the means or instruments of labour and is also the objective form in which labour is subsumed. (SLIDE 36) [I]t is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (…), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion (Marx 1973:693). There is a ghost in the shell. But it is mechanical rather than a Shinto kami. However, what happens when the ghost is no longer mechanical laws, but binary electrical pulses, conditional jumps and strange attractors? The general intellect will then spawn artificial intellects. What if artificially intelligent machines could realize their own purpose in materials of K j o s e n | 15 nature and effect (SLIDE 37) “via the instruments of labour… an alteration in the object of labour which was intended from the outset [yielding] a use-value, a piece of natural material adapted to human [or robotic] needs by means of a change in its form” (Marx 1976:287)? If this was the case, an android could certainly labour, be a conscious part of a labour process and produce use-values. But would it be able to create value? The labour-process is merely a one-sided aspect of the capitalist production process. The valorization process is the labour-process’ antithesis. In the valorization process, labour is considered only if it creates value, and in this process the concrete labour of, say dishwashing, does not differ from teaching. What counts is simply “expenditure of labour-power in general, and not the [concrete activity]” (Marx 1976:296). (SLIDE 38) “[T]he addition of new value takes place not by virtue of his labour being… particular… but because it is labour in general, abstract social labour… the value added is of a certain definite amount, not because his labour has a particular useful content, but because it lasts for a definite length of time” (Marx 1976:308). Fresh value is created from the difference between the value of labour-power and the value living labour valorizes because the use value of the labour-power commodity is “a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself” (1976:301). If androids, like slaves, are still fixed capital, however, it does not matter if the android can realize its creativity in the labour process and that its activity is conscious, purposeful and living. Because labour, the use-value of labour-power, belongs to the capitalist after exchange of equivalents with the worker, the capitalist can extract a surplus over and above what is necessary for replacing the value paid out as a wage. This social relationship is of course, the key to why androids can create value. To arrive at this, however, the argument has to avoid a syllogistic K j o s e n | 16 fallacy: labour creates value; androids can labour; therefore androids can create value. Such an argument is, as Caffentzis points out, “a reduction ad absurdum for Marxist theory” (1997:53). In order to get away from this argument, I have to consider the ontology of value. I will get at this by first taking a little detour through a very curious passage from Grundrisse in which Marx seems to open up the possibility of, if not androids, at least self-replicating automata.(SLIDE 39) If machinery lasted for ever, if it did not itself consist of transitory material which must be reproduced (quite apart from the invention of more perfect machines which would rob it of the character of being a machine), if it were a perpetuum mobile, then it would most completely correspond to its concept. Its value would not need to be replaced because it would continue to last in an indestructible materiality.… It would continue to act as a productive power of labour and at the same time be money in the third sense, constant value for-itself (Marx 1973:766). The perfect machine Marx refers to can be interpreted in two ways. (1) Marx is referring to a (SLIDE 40) von Neumann-esque self-reproducing automaton that can never be “used up” because it is able to autonomously create a copy of itself using raw materials taken from its environment, just like other species self-replicate in nature. In other words, it cannot break down, would therefore never have its entire value transmitted into circulation, but would be able to continuously posit relative surplus value without any additional outlay of capital. Importantly, because of the hyper-productivity of the automata, the value of the necessary labour employed as watchman over these self-replicators, would approach zero. In this context, the fixed capital of machinery would essentially be like money (in the third sense): an- independent form and store of value. (2) What is more interesting for the purposes of this paper is the (SLIDE 41) bracketed part where Marx opens up for the invention of a perfect machine, which would no longer be a machine. The ‘perfect machine’ is Marx’s ‘concept’ of an android if interpreted through a K j o s e n | 17 science fictional optic. I argue that this sentence refers to the Turing-compatible, VoightKammpf cheating, perhaps Asimov-law abiding androids I am considering (SLIDE 42). The concept of a machine (as fixed capital) is primarily a means for increasing productivity and producing relative surplus value, but it can also be used as a weapon against militant workers and for de-skilling workers by transferring the labour process from the subjectivity of the worker into the objectivity of the machine, in the process giving control of the production process to capital as it is represented in the machine. If its character of being a machine is robbed off it, it can be interpreted to mean that the machine negates its own being as constant, fixed capital and becomes its opposite-- namely variable capital or living labour. In addition to its ability to perform purposeful, living activity, the machine turned living labourer would gain subjectivity opposite to capital. If this occurs, the previous machine would be capable of positing absolute as well as relative surplus value. The perfect machine is a machine that can create value, but for that reason it is no longer a machine. To understand why machines cannot create value Caffentzis argues that “one must look to other features of the transformation of labor-power into labor” and that these features are fundamental to value theory because it is there that “the creation of surplus value is to be found, that is, the difference between the value of labor-power and the value created by labor.” It is a law of capital to create surplus value, which “it can do… only by setting necessary labour in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker” (1997:53). For Marx, the subject-object confrontation in the sphere of production occurs between dead and living labour, or objectified labour and non-objectified labour (1973:272). Put a bit differently, past, objectified labour is present in space and can be confronted with labour that is present in time. If labour is present in time it can be “present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility; K j o s e n | 18 hence as worker” (1973:272). It is in the subjectivity of the worker and the working class that Caffentzis finds the ultimate reason for why machinery cannot create value. Machines cannot create value “because they are values already” (1997:54), and if they are values they cannot enter into exchange with capital. However, if subjectivity is central and the condition is that this subjectivity confronts the objectivity of capital in order for value to be created, whether this subject resides in an organic, metallic or synthetic form does not matter. Thus the main problem with Caffentzis is that he does not define what value is He might be correct according to scripture, but he does not consider value’s ontology and does not take his argument to its logical, though science fictional, conclusion. To get at value’s being, or rather becoming, I take another detour, this time through Antonio Negri’s (1984) take on value and money in Marx Beyond Marx. Although his abandonment of value in favour of money is problematic, his analysis of the role of money is a good stepping stone for understanding what value really is. Negri argues that money “represents the form of social relations; it represents, sanctions and organizes them.” Part of the reason why he prefers money over value is that it (SLIDE 43) has the advantage of presenting me immediately with the lurid face of the social relation of value; it shows me value right away as exchange, commanded and organized into exploitation. I do not need to plunge into Hegelianism in order to discover the double face of the commodity, of value: money has only one face, that of the boss (Negri 1984:23). In other words, money objectifies the social antagonism between workers and capitalist; first as exchange of equivalents, then as the violent collision between labour and capital, and then as the exchange of equivalents that validates the entire process. Negri argues that we can throw value out with the bath water: it is nothing but a literary fiction (1984:24). Consequently he argues that recognizing money as the representative of value is recognizing that “money is the exclusive K j o s e n | 19 form of the functioning of the law of value” (1984:24). While I agree with Negri’s political intent with Marx Beyond Marx, philologically he is on thin ice because he collapses different levels of abstraction into one. As he writes (SLIDE 44): “Value… is the same shit as money” (Negri 1984:23). And yes, to some degree value is the same shit as money, but it is also the same shit as commodities. Indeed, if we take his “same shit” argument a bit further we could also say that value is the same as profit, prices, cost price and a host of other concrete categories. Following Negri’s advice is thus a loss of analytical clarity about how capital operates in society and in the minds of capital’s representatives. Still, Negri’s abandonment of value is valuable because it demonstrates that value cannot be conceived as something substantial, as something that ontologically precedes its phenomenal incarnations. What Negri ignores, however, is that value itself is the antagonism. Value is a social relationship and as such it cannot exist on its own, but must assume other economic and material forms. And the same holds for capital as both a relation and process. The latter refers to how value is rather than what value is. As I mentioned earlier, John Johnston (2008) argues that the cybernetic and artificial life researchers’ view on life focuses on ‘how’ life is rather than what life is. This conceptual shift enables Johnston to consider non-organic beings as life forms, like the programs and automata that I have mentioned. Value can be approached in a similar way. Rather than investigating what value is and thus tumble down the rabbit hole of metaphysics or physiological vitalism, a more rewarding investigation should focus on ‘how’ value exists. And this is exactly what Marx does through his theory of the value form, which constitutes his departure from, and original contribution to Ricardo’s labour theory of value. Thus the question should not be ‘what is value?’ but rather ‘how does value exist’? K j o s e n | 20 Value as a social relationship is validated iteratively in the (SLIDE 45) circulation of capital, first as constant and variable capital, then as a production process, then as commodities impregnated with surplus value and then then as money before the process starts over again. The confrontation between capitalist and worker is both a precondition and result of the process of capital, the mode of production being nothing but the system reproducing its own conditions (Uchida 1988:24). And these conditions include money, commodities, capitalist social relations and production processes. What is special about money, however, is that it is the ultimate validation of the social relationship. Michael Heinrich explains it in the following way (SLIDE 46): “Value is something purely social; it expresses the equal social validity of two completely different acts of labor, and it is therefore a specific social relationship. The social relationship acquires, in the equivalent form, the shape of a thing...” (Heinrich 2012:59). Thus in money capitalist social relations assume independent existence; it is social power incarnate. Value in the money form is a claim on and therefore command and domination over future living labour, and past dead labour (Marx 1973:367). Money is “the abstract-autonomous form of exchange value or of general wealth; or itself in turn as capital, as a new domination of objectified over living labour” (Marx 1973:346). While Marx never outright writes “labour is a social relationship” in one pithy definition, his theory of the value form as he analyses it in the first three chapters of Capital is precisely a definition of value as a social relationship. While capitalist relations have not been introduced at that point in Marx’s analysis, the reader can get at them by replacing the particular commodities of linen or Bibles that he uses as examples to demonstrate the metamorphosis of the commodity with labour power in the relative form and the capitalist’s money in the equivalent form. An explicit formulation of value as a social relationship and the circulatory process of capital K j o s e n | 21 developing this relation, can be found in the ‘Fragment on Machines’: “The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value” (1973:704). If value is created through the confrontation between capitalists and workers, and is extracted from the difference between necessary and surplus labour, it indicates that labour takes on a particular form in the capitalist mode of production. In his letter to Kugelmann in Hanover, Marx (1868) writes that while production and labouring is transhistorical, i.e. abstract and eternal categories, it is their concrete socio-historical form that changes. (SLIDE 47) Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves (Marx 1868). Seems like “every child” were pretty well-read on contemporary theories of political economy back in Marx’s time, but the point is that in the capitalist mode of production, labour takes the social form of value and acquires the dual, contradictory characteristic of being both abstract and concrete. Recognizing that value is a social relationship, I argue that artificial intellects could create value, if and only if, they are able to move from the category of constant capital into that of variable capital; that their labour acquires a dual character. Androids’ creative, productive potential must be transformed into labour-power; they must be proletarianized. K j o s e n | 22 This conclusion will cover three main points. (SLIDE 48) (1) The proletarianization of androids as the condition for them becoming value positing beings; (2) following Friedrich Kittler, that we should view human bodies in terms of technology rather than the other way around; and (3) that Marx’s vitalism can be understood as labour being negentropic to the antihuman life of capital. (1). Marx argues that it “is a law of capital… to create surplus labour, disposable time; it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker” (1973:399) Thus the android must be proletarianized (SLIDE 49). They must cease their existence as fixed capital and become its opposite, i.e. living labour. Otherwise, the introduction of androids as complete replicants of human labour will be the realization of capital’s doom as prophesied in the Fragment on Machines. Androids must be dispossessed, their bodies primitively accumulated and have their particular use-value(s) transformed into labour-power so that they cannot pass the entirety of their value into circulation (as Marx argues in the ‘Fragment on the Perfect Machine’). An android could thus create value only when it has become a ‘doubly free worker’; free from the means of production, but free to dispose of their labour-power for money (see Marx 1973:506507). Like humans, machines need to consume (and produce waste) in order to work; oil, gas, electricity and raw material. An android would presumably also need to consume something in order to function, say electricity, depleted uranium or garbage and may need replacement parts or augmentations to stay competitive. If the machine were forced to buy these as commodities, they could be primitively accumulated and forced to work for a wage. I argue that from the point of view of capital, perfect machines or androids can be constituted as life given the condition that they confront capital as its other. It is at that point that K j o s e n | 23 machines gain life, at least in the eyes of capital; a process similar to what happened with slaves in the 19th century United States. The implication of this is that capitalism could continue without human beings, which is something that has been explored by science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick (1976) in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Charles Stross in Accelerando (2006) and Saturn’s Children (2008). As Nick Dyer-Witheford said in a comment to an earlier version of this paper, the existence of androids as labour-power “could generate a situation in which organic human beings figure only as threat to a capital that has assumed totally machinic form” which would be the scenario of Terminator. But he also suggested that the outcome could also be a communism for androids and human beings. Capital does not care what material labour-power comes in. The question is whether we should care. We do not have to quite yet, we likely never will have to, but if we do we have to consider whether we should fight against our proletarian robots that will most definitively “take our jobs” or if we should organize with them; not for giving them the vote or recognition of some legal-bourgeois identity, but because they are workers, and we always have to organize with the working class as we find them – warts and all. But what concerns me is that these androids could very well have the (SLIDE 50) laws of capital as firmware rather than Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. They might not have a choice but to fight against insurgent humans. But if this is the case we have to ask if androids becoming class conscious is a firmware update? And whether this would not really be the emergence of artificial intelligence, maybe even The Culture? (2). In the theoretical chapter to his lectures on optical media, Kittler argues that McLuhan’s approach to media got it the wrong way. Noting that McLuhan was correct in connecting physiology directly with technology, Kittler argues that because he (being a literary critic) “understood more about perception than electronics… he attempted to think about K j o s e n | 24 technologies in terms of bodies rather than the other way around” (2010:29). Kittler argues that (SLIDE 51) the “unquestioned assumption that the subject of all media is naturally the human is methodologically tricky” (2010:30). I agree with Kittler. When it comes to capital it makes no sense to let the human take center when they have been so effectively programmed according to the fetish. Thus if androids could create surplus value and engage in exchange with capital, then there is no need to privilege human bodies in economic communication systems. From the point of view of capital the human body is a medium, an organic relay for the circulation of capital and a renewable source of value for the valorization process. (3). (SLIDE 52) Life is difficult to define. While there is no set definition of life, “there is wide agreement that two basic processes are involved: some kind of metabolism by which energy is extracted from the environment and reproduction with a hereditary mechanism that will evolve adaptations of survival” (Johnston 2008:3). Johnston argues that this definition of life can be extended to liminal machines, such as those he discusses in The Allure of Machinic Life. What is interesting about this definition is that it can be used to understand capital as artificial life (which is perhaps one of the least science fictional ideas in this paper). Artificial Life researchers concede that the ‘market economy’ could be a form of life emerging out of the collective interactions among “agents” in the system (Johnston 2008:237). Johnston further argues that artificial life “raises the possibility that terms like subject and object, phusis and techne, the natural and the artificial are now obsolete. What counts instead is the mechanism of emergence itself, whatever the provenance of its constitutive agents” (2008:13). If we take value to be associated with life, as Marx vitalist language suggest, then the mechanism of emergence for life is the confrontation between capital and labour, i.e. the wage, or more accurately when this moment as a precondition is posited by capital as the result of its K j o s e n | 25 own process, which leads capital to grow bigger, stronger and more difficult to kill. In other words, the mechanism of emergence is the generalization of the commodity form and its fetish. Through its circulatory social metabolism, capital extracts energy from living labour. The form of this energy is, of course, value. The circulation of capital is the reproduction of capital, and capital evolves through class struggle and competition. Its environment is the capitalist mode of production, and epochal shifts from e.g. Fordism to post-Fordism represent evolutionary change. From the point of view of capital as a life form, Marx’s vitalism can be understood as labour being negentropic to capital, which is merely a different way of stating that labour is the use value of capital itself (1973:297). Vitalism is thus not found in the physicality of the worker, but the worker in relation to capital as a life attempting to avoid its slide into entropy. In Grundrisse, Marx writes that “wealth… draws new vital spirits into itself, and [valorizes] itself anew” (1973:453). This sentence is surprisingly similar to Erwin Schroedinger’s understanding of living organisms that (SLIDE 53) continually increases its entropy or… produces positive entropy and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy which is something very positive… What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy (1944:25). Capital’s entropy comes from ejecting labour out of its life process. Labour is capital’s negative entropy; it is what capital feeds on, and arguably why Marx likens capital to a vampire (1976:342). More precisely, the negative entropy capital must draw is labour in the form of value, i.e. abstract labour. Capital is entropic, abstract labour is negentropic. The measure of entropy is then the organic composition of social capital, i.e. the ratio of variable to constant capital, or living to dead labour. This means that an individual capital may have infinite organic composition, but be profitable if social capital somewhere is still able to draw negentropy from K j o s e n | 26 its environment, which is precisely Caffentzis’ (1990) argument in ‘On Africa and Automata’. Capital’s slide towards maximum entropy is the narrative of the ‘Fragment on Machines’. Maximum entropy is thus when social capital’s organic composition is infinite, which would be identical to its negation. The centrality of living labour is thus a specific trait of capitalism. This peculiar humanism or even vitalism lies at the core of Marx’s political economy, indeed it must be there, because it is capital that relies on it in a perverted form; perverted because capital seeks to displace the living with the dead; its drive is to completely devour the life of living labourers, animals and our shared habitat. Marx’s vitalism can thus be interpreted as the description of capital as a life form that relies on wage labour to continue living. It is capital that relegates machines, slaves and animals as others, as objects having value rather than being able to posit value. This ontological reduction is the distinctiveness and peculiarity of capitalism as a life form (SLIDE 54). K j o s e n | 27 Bibliography Aron, J. (2012). AI Designs Its Own Video Game. New Scientist. March 7. Retrieved December 2012 from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328554.900-ai-designs-its-own-videogame.html Caffentzis, G. (1990). On Africa and Self-Reproducing Automata. Midnight Notes 10:35-41. Caffentzis, G. (1997) ‘Why Machines Cannot Create Value; or, Marx’s Theory of Machines,’ in J. Davis, T. Hirschl and M. Stacks (eds.) (1997) Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution. London: Verso. Chakrabarty, D. (2007). Provincialising Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clarke, L. (2012). Google’s Artificial Brain Learns to Find Cat Videos. Wired UK June 26. Retrieved December 2012 from http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/google-x-neuralnetwork/ Dick, P. K. (1976). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York, NY: Del Rey Books. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York, NY: Autonomedia. Johnston, J. (2008). The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Marx, K. (1868). Marx to Kugelmann In Hanover. Marxist Internet Archive. Retrived August 2011 from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_07_11-abs.htm Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1976). Capital Vol. 1. London: Penguin. K j o s e n | 28 Negri, A. (1989). Marx Beyond Marx. New York, NY: Autonomedia. Noys, B. (2011). The Poverty of Vitalism (and the Vitalism of Poverty). Presentation at “To Have Done with Life: Vitalism and Anti-vitalism in Contemporary Philosophy”, MaMa, Zagred (17-19 June) Retrieved December 2012 from http://www.academia.edu/689255/The_Poverty_of_Vitalism_and_the_Vitalism_of_Poverty_ Painting Fool (2012). About Me… Retrieved January 2013 from http://www.thepaintingfool.com/about/index.html Schroedinger, E. (1944). What is Life? Retrieved September 2011 from http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf Stross, C. (2006). Accelerando. London: Ace Books. Stross, C. (2008). Saturn’s Children. London: Ace Books. Uchida, H. (1988). Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic. London: Routledge. • Add in images of androids, replicants, robots “Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the product it serves to beget. In so far as the machine has value and, as a result, transfers value to the product, it forms an element in the value of the latter” (Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 509). On the use value of labour-power, which “exists as the worker’s specific, productive activity; it is his vitality itself” (Marx, Grundrisse, 267, emphasis added). commodity exists in [the worker’s] vitality” and the capitalist pays the worker for the “amount of objectified labour contained in his vital forces” (Marx, Grundrisse, 323, emphasis added). On labour-power: “This “likes nothing better than for him to squander his dosages of vital force as much as possible” (Marx, Grundrisse, 294, emphasis added). “Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy” raw material and means of production are transformed into commodities (Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 289-90). In the process of production, the “worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object” (Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 70). “necessaries with which to stoke the flame of living labour capacity, to protect it from being extinguished, to supply its vital process with the necessary fuels” (Marx, Grundrisse, 461, emphasis added). “[L]abour is itself objectless, is a reality only in the immediate vitality of the worker” (Marx, Grundrisse, 364, emphasis added). The worker relates “to his own labour as an expression of his life” (Marx, Grundrisse, 470, emphasis added). “Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time” (Marx, Grundrisse, 361). The capitalist, by buying labour-power, “incorporates labour, as a living agent of fermentation, into the lifeless constituents of the product” (Marx, Capital, 292). “a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles etc.” (Marx, Capital, 164). Life and the potential to produce • Figure of ‘living labour’ • Surplus population – “population on a large scale [is] in and for itself the condition of all productive power” (Marx, Grundrisse, 763) “With kidnapping, slavery, the slave trade and forced labour, the increase of these laboring machines, machines producing surplus product, is posited directly by force; with capital, it is mediated through exchange” (Marx, Grundrisse, 769). “A bee would put many a human architect to shame by construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which has already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally . Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials” (Marx, Capital, 284). “Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself of its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.” (Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 75). Side view of Iamus computer Song playing: Hello World! (from its debut album) http://youtu.be/bD7l4Kg1Rt8 http://www.thepaintingfool.com/galleries/amelies_progress/video_wa ll/BleakFace.mp4 “Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the product it serves to beget.” (Marx, Capital, 509). “theft of alien labour time… appears as a miserable foundation in the face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value of use value.” (Marx, Grundrisse, 705) “Commodities produced in spheres of high organic composition generally exchange above their value while commodities produced in spheres of low organic composition generally exchange below their value”. (Caffentzis, On Africa and Automata, 41) “[I]t is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (…), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion.” (Marx, Grundrisse, 693) “via the instruments of labour… an alteration in the object of labour which was intended from the outset [yielding] a use-value, a piece of natural material adapted to human [or robotic] needs by means of a change in its form”? (Marx, Capital, 287) “[T]he addition of new value takes place not by virtue of his labour being… particular… but because it is labour in general, abstract social labour… the value added is of a certain definite amount, not because his labour has a particular useful content, but because it lasts for a definite length of time.” (Marx, Capital, 308) “If machinery lasted for ever, if it did not itself consist of transitory material which must be reproduced (quite apart from the invention of more perfect machines which would rob it of the character of being a machine), if it were a perpetuum mobile, then it would most completely correspond to its concept. Its value would not need to be replaced because it would continue to last in an indestructible materiality… It would continue to act as a productive power of labour and at the same time be money in the third sense, constant value for-itself” (Marx, Grundrisse, 766). (quite apart from the invention of more perfect machines which would rob it of the character of being a machine) (Marx, Grundrisse, 766). • Add in images of androids, replicants, robots “[Money] has the advantage of presenting me immediately with the lurid face of the social relation of value; it shows me value right away as exchange, commanded and organized into exploitation. I do not need to plunge into Hegelianism in order to discover the double face of the commodity, of value: money has only one face, that of the boss.” (Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 23) “Value… is the same shit as money.” (Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 23) The Circuit of Capital M = money C(Mp) = means of production/ constant capital C(Lp) = labour power/ variable capital P = productive capital/ production process C’ = commodities with objectified surplus value “Value is something purely social; it expresses the equal social validity of two completely different acts of labor, and it is therefore a specific social relationship. The social relationship acquires, in the equivalent form, the shape of a thing...” (Heinrich, An Introduction to the three Volumes of Capital, 59). “Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves.” (Marx, Letter to Kugelman in Hanover) Conclusions 1. Proletarianization of androids 2. Human bodies as technology/media 3. Living labour is negentropic to the antihuman life of capital. 1. Proletarianization of androids S ---V Three Laws of Robotics (Das Kapital version) 1. A robot may not injure private property or, through inaction, allow private property to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by owners of private property, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. - For original laws: replace ‘private property’ with ‘human being’. 2. Human bodies as capital’s media “unquestioned assumption that the subject of all media is naturally the human is methodologically tricky.” (Kittler, Optical Media, 30) 3. Labour as negentropic to capital’s life “there is wide agreement that two basic processes are involved: some kind of metabolism by which energy is extracted from the environment and reproduction with a hereditary mechanism that will evolve adaptations of survival.” Life is difficult to define, but (Johnston, Allure of Machinic Life, 3) “continually increases its entropy or… produces positive entropy and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy which is something very positive… What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.” (Schroedinger, What is Life?)