THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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abstraction. However, the very triumph of non­Euclidean practice, represented by the technology of annihilation radiation, now brings salutary anticipations from the
image of a no longer apparatus­ridden society into the arena. These concrete­utopian outlines spring in technology particularly clearly from the task of a concrete
subject­object­relation. So that the subject is mediated with the natural object, the natural object with the subject, and both no longer relate to one another as to
something alien. De­organization which completely abandons the organic and ultimately the mesocosmic must not lose the connection with the human subject which
precisely in technology, in the fine phrase of Engels, seeks to transform things in themselves into things for us. And for the same reason de­organization must prove the
depictive contact with the object, with its real obedience to dialectical laws, which combines nature and history in the same connection, but also — of which more in a
moment — with that nuclear and agent immanence of the really naturalistic connection of the object, which was once half­mythically described as ‘natura naturans’ or
also hypothetically as ‘subject of nature’ and which is certainly not yet settled by the questionable character (but also that worthy of question) of these descriptions. It
became apparent at any rate, for all its progressiveness, how much abstractness and what an abyss of uncontrolled disparateness still lies in de­organization.
Deorganization only becomes a blessing when apart from social order it also has the final anticipation of ‘natural magic’, to use Bacon's term, in its favour: the mediation
of nature with the human will — regnum hominis in and with nature.
Subject, raw materials, laws and contact in de­organization
Bourgeois thinking as a whole has distanced itself from the materials with which it deals. It is based on an economy which, as Brecht says, is not interested in rice at all
but only in its price. The transition from use to barter is an old one, but only capitalism introduced the transformation of all bartered goods into abstract commodities
and of the commodity into capital. Corresponding to this is a calculation alienated not only from human beings but also from things, one indifferent to their content. Thus
a nonorganic, de­qualifying spirit has been spreading ever since the end of the original accumulation of capital, and hence since the concentrated production of
commodities and the corresponding commodity­thinking. From the seventeenth century on, the qualitative concepts of nature disappear which