Information Technology Reference
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and embodied usefulness, but instead for their exchange value. The
value of money no longer refers to its intrinsic worth as metal, or
what it might represent in stocks of gold. Wealth is in liquid form
rather than tied to ownership of land. The complex web of feudal
social relations is replaced by the 'cash nexus'. Workers are regarded
as abstract labour power. Thus signification itself becomes autono-
mous, and signifiers move independently from the world of mat-
erial objects. As Karl Marx analysed in the first section of
Das
Kapital
, the commodity is at the heart of capitalism's capacity to
operate in abstract terms. Marx shows how, in order to be circulated,
commodities have to be considered in terms of their exchange value.
This is a form of 'semiotization' in that the commodity's physical
and material character ceases to be of account in relation to its
capacity to circulate, as a sign, within a capitalist society.
5
As long
as a commodity is circulating thus it can be considered in terms
of its comparative value against other commodities. Labour too is
considered a commodity in that it too is exchanged for money.
Turing's imaginary device not only invokes the typewriter, one
of the paradigmatic information technologies of nineteenth-century
capitalism, but also, in the tape and writing head assemblage, the
very model of the assembly line. Moreover, the algorithmic method
which his machine was intended to automate is itself a model of
the division of labour, which, as both Adam Smith and, later,
Marx realized, lies at the heart of efficient capitalist production.
Smith begins
The Wealth of Nations
with his famous description of
the manufacture of pins, an operation divided, according to Smith,
into eighteen different parts, each of which can be undertaken by
a separate labourer.
6
In this manner a far greater number of pins
can be produced per person than if one worker undertook the
whole process of manufacture for each pin. The division of labour
also allows each individual action to become a repeatable and
interchangeable sign. Codified in this manner, the operations of
production can be more easily understood and controlled. This can
