Exchange value is a character always present, but is always somewhat hidden and always somewhat incidental or peripheral to reality, a character that has long lived “in the pores of society,” like the Jew; a character who—for Marx—is the Jew in every society.⁵⁰⁰ Over several centuries (and Marx follows it from Ancient Greece to industrial Europe and as far as Balzac) it becomes the ultimate character of all reality, to which everything relates, the basis of perception, which permeates every detail. That world in which things have to be exchangeable in order to exist is the world that Marx, and only Marx, has fully described in all the phases of its alchemical process. It is the world in which we naturally continue living, that cloaks us all the time with an invisible film. Marx is immensely helpful for us, not because of his crude, humanistic, repellent, inflated, barroom conceptions of social justice, of what ought to happen, but because of his invaluable description of the society of substitution, of exchange, as it is—today, now, everywhere, in the fixity of its perpetual expansion.

When real estate and landed property begins to be encompassed by money, the Immutable recognizes its own subjection to the mutable power of exchange. The emblematic transition is already perceivable in the writings of a seventeenth-century pamphleteer, Edward Misselden: “… where before mony was invented, there was an Exchange, or Permutation in moveable and mutable things onely, as Corne, Wine, Oile, and the like: and afterwards in immoveable and immutable things, as Houses, Lands and the like; there was a necessity of mony, to value such things with mony as could not be exchanged.⁵⁰¹ And so by degrees all things came to bee valued with money, and mony the value of all things.” If everything is divisible (insofar as everything is translatable into money, and money is divisible), then nothing inalienable exists any longer. And what is indivisible? Quality. But quality, since it is part of an object, is subject to the rule that applies to all objects, namely that they are translatable into price. And so, at most, it will produce a higher price. Quality becomes luxury—and as such controllable, divisible, and exchangeable. Prestige, which was the origin of all value, the primordial exuberance, becomes the value of what is superfluous.

Quality: heir of prestige. The unit for measuring prestige is unascertainable. Prestige is a power that is displayed: through emblems, ordeals, minglings with other forces. We have no unit for measuring force, or at least the force that Giordano Bruno was still dealing with, but was no longer of concern to Newton.

The closure of the cavity of images, as soon as the “money-crystal,” Geldkristall, is set into it, would seem to herald an invasion of images into immediate reality, a coniunctio that would lead back to the origin. But this doesn’t happen: the money-crystal refracts only the images of circulation (commodities), whereas its hidden face—which looks out onto the world of images like a porthole onto the ocean—is opaque: on that side the money-crystal offers only a total closure.⁵⁰² The opposite occurs among the units of circulation: when money—the crystal set in the empty cavity of circulation, like a “universal equivalent”—is introduced among them, it produces changes that reverberate on the whole boundless range of commodities. These commodities, which until then could assume any form, must now be regulated; they have to fulfill at least three requirements: