Temporality of Capital

The "Temporality of Capital" names the peculiar inversion of cause and effect that structures capitalist valorization: the future return (profit, interest, dividends) is treated as the causal ground that legitimates present investment, so that what is logically and chronologically posterior — the ex post facto effect — is installed as the ex ante facto cause. This is not a cognitive error or ideological distortion superimposed on an otherwise neutral economic mechanism; it is the constitutive logic of capital's self-reproduction. Drawing on Marx's account of "fictitious capital" (credit, interest-bearing capital, financial instruments that appear to generate value without passing through production), the concept in Kornbluh's argument designates the ontological instability this temporal inversion produces: there is no stable "real" time against which capital's fictitious rearrangement can be measured, because capitalist temporality itself is structured by the retroactive conversion of effects into causes. This aligns with Lacan's broader principle that the signifier retroactively determines the meaning of what precedes it — Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action — but here applied to the economic register of value-production.

The concept therefore operates at the intersection of temporality, ontology, and tropology. By positioning this temporal inversion as a trope — specifically, a metalepsis (the rhetorical figure in which cause and effect are exchanged) — Kornbluh (drawing on de Man) links it to the self-reflexive poetics of the Victorian realist novel. The novel form, with its irony, its retrospective narration, and its self-conscious artifice, is argued to be formally homologous to this structure: it too installs the ending (resolution, meaning, totality) as the retroactive cause of its own unfolding. The "Temporality of Capital" thus names not merely an economic phenomenon but the structural logic that makes fictitious capital irreducibly undecidable — neither simply false nor simply real — and that the literary text is uniquely positioned to think.

Within kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for, the Temporality of Capital is the pivot on which the broader argument about "fictitious capital" as a self-reflexive trope turns. It is an extension and specification of the cross-referenced concept of Fictitious Capital: where fictitious capital names the ontological class of financial instruments that seem to produce value without material grounding, the Temporality of Capital explains the mechanism — the ex post / ex ante inversion — by which that fiction is structurally sustained rather than simply exposed and corrected. It is also in close dialogue with Contradiction: the temporal inversion produces an irreducible contradiction (effects are causes; the future grounds the present) that cannot be dialectically sublated, only perpetually reproduced. This links it to the cross-referenced Dialectics, but as a limit case — capital's temporality is precisely what resists dialectical resolution into a stable synthesis of real and fictitious.

The concept further intersects with Ideology and Fantasy. Ideology, as defined in the corpus, is constitutively incomplete and requires fantasy as its supplement; the Temporality of Capital provides a structural-economic account of how this incompleteness is sustained at the level of valorization itself, not merely at the level of representation or belief. Fantasy's function — converting the void left by the non-existence of a guaranteed real into a structured fiction — finds its economic correlate in the way capital treats non-existent future returns as present causal grounds. The cross-referenced concept of the Real is also implicated: the Temporality of Capital is precisely what makes the "real" of capital inaccessible, since every attempt to distinguish real from fictitious value is itself caught within the temporal inversion the concept describes. Finally, the invocation of Metaphor and Structuralism in the cross-references points to the rhetorical-literary dimension: the temporal inversion is a tropological operation (metalepsis), and the Victorian novel's formal structures are read as isomorphic with — and capable of critically illuminating — this economic logic.

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian FormAnna Kornbluh · 2014 (p.7)

Valorized exchange thus entails the conversion of ex post facto effects into ex ante facto causes.

The phrase "conversion of ex post facto effects into ex ante facto causes" is theoretically loaded because it names a precise logical inversion — not mere illusion but a structural reversal of temporal order — that makes capital's "fictitious" dimension constitutive rather than incidental; the Latin legal terminology ("ex post facto," "ex ante facto") underscores that this is a formal, quasi-juridical operation internal to valorization itself, not an external mystification.