The commodity, as it is conceptualized in the Marxist tradition, opens up the discussion on the way our social relations are materialized. Therefore, we should consider the commodity as an entry point: under the current economic and political conditions, it is the negative space of debt turned into a thing. This conceptualization of the commodity helps us explore the ways it performs the contradictions present within ourselves.
At the heart of this mapping, a new form of subjectivity emerges – the dividual. The commodity plays a significant role in discerning the dividual as it is the locus of a multitude of subjectivities. As far as forms of subjectivity go, the common Darwinian evolutionary biology as well as creationism, both tell a similar, linear story of progress from nonhumans to humans. Although they are perceived as rivalling narratives, here they present a rather similar story: objects turn into subjects, either by gradual “natural selection,” as Charles Darwin describes it in Chapter IV of The Origin of Species, or by divine construction as revealed in the Book of Genesis. Marxian analysis of the commodity proposes a totally different mode of becoming of subjectivities, and ironically, it fits pagan and polytheistic notions of reincarnation. These traditions seem to resonate much more with the realities of contemporary modes of labour than evolutionary or monotheistic myths. To put it simply, commodities are actually reincarnations of the subjects who laboured them – who designed, produced, delivered, marketed, sold, bought, used them, re-used them etc. Paradoxically, the Marxian critique of political economy manifests here an animistic quality.
Commodities, then, are ghost traps. In the cult movie Ghostbusters (dir. Ivan Reitman, 1984), a parapsychologist manufactures a trap to capture ghosts and together with his partners goes around midtown Manhattan to eliminate them. The Ghostbusters trap is an allegory of the commodity. As the reincarnated materials of our social relations, commodities are ghost-machines of labourers (be they producers or consumers). They are traps from which our collective subjectivities can emerge.
Under capital’s technocratic Fascism, labour has moved from production to consumption. Commodities operate therefore as materializations of our social relations, both from the perspective of production (with alienation as its key mode of experience), but also from the perspective of that other daily labour divorced from employment – consumption (with its key mode of experience shifting towards debt). Marx himself explained that while a commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing, “its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Slavoj Žižek points out that this famous description of the commodity does not follow a simple empiricist scenario by which a transcendent entity is unveiled as a trivial everyday thing, but rather the opposite: Marx proposes the commodity, which appears to be a mundane and common thing, to be abounding in metaphysical subtleties.
The project I have been involved with in recent years has been dedicated to the commodity as a precursor for any thing in the world. This relates to the work of many who found ways for art to embody an auto-critique of financialised capitalism. This proposal considers the reality of privatization to be the latest stage of colonization. By this I mean that the patterns of colonization have met their limits with the colonization of the entire world by capitalism after 1990, and they have since returned to haunt the colonizing not only through anti-colonial resistance, but through the same logic applied back home as privatization – this logic was presented by Hannah Arendt when describing the way the same technologies that gave birth to nineteenth-century imperialist exploitations overseas (race-thinking and the nation-state) in turn gave rise to totalitarianism in the twentieth century in the “metropole” of the empires. The outside therefore becomes the inside. Privatization is thus seen as a regime of taxation without representation, in which a process of becoming-rent of profit generates an indebted generation overqualified for the employment market. By overqualified, one should understand that all living labour under conditions of late capitalism is overqualified: the new protocols of accumulation incorporate qualifications that were previously outside its reach, especially in the sphere of reproductive labour.
THE OVERQUALIFIED
With labor accessible to capital worldwide, the employment problem was resolved for capital by the deunionized labor of the debt economy. Today, not only do we suffer from the de-unionized labor market when entering the employment market, and go into debt through student loans and paying state and life taxes (privatized services), but we are also overqualified for the employment market. The fact is that we are people who can write code, heal, play an instrument, photograph, translate, teach, as well as master the software of several graphic design and video editing programs. Eventually, these people who were just described here, find a day job for a few hours a week teaching art to kids in a private elementary school and work evening shifts waiting tables in a bar.
The assembly line runs through us now, and labour has expanded from production to consumption. From the Fordist labor-time of the assembly-line, to the never-ending eternal-labor online, one should consider the internet as a global time-clock on with we punch our card of subjectivity via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram – all platforms of unpaid labor. Being less about production of goods and more about circulation of subjectivities, our shockwork exhausts various gestures and practices that seemed just a few decades ago to hold substantial critical weight. One can observe how cloud computing, forwarding and Tweeting have made appropriation strategies redundant as a critical tool.
As Marx explains, the productive powers of labor under capitalism appear as the creative power of capital. Franco “Bifo” Berardi has made this point explicit by describing how the general intellect has turned into labor. Yet this productive potency of labour can no longer be contained and organized by capitalism, because, as Bifo put is: “value can no longer be defined in terms of average necessary work time.” Today, with post-Fordist performative labor, we see how many aspects of life have been penetrated to constitute new forms of labor even before entering the employment market.
Nick Srnicek’s and Alex Williams’s “Acceleration Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” addresses this directly as the authors write that when John Maynard Keynes was writing in 1930 his “The Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren,” he could still have envisioned “an enlightened capitalism inevitably progressed towards a radical reduction of working hours.” Keynes saw a capitalist future where people would have their work reduced to three hours a day. But as Srnicek and Williams declare, what has instead occurred is “the progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory.”
THE DIVIDUAL
One can see how in the civilization of private property how we live in the world of negation. Private property is by definition a negation – it is deprived and excluded from others therefore it is mine, Marx has already remarked. What this means is that exchange is no human relationship, but “it is the abstract relation of private property to private property, and this abstract relation is the value which acquires a real existence as value only in the form of money.” The social relationship of private property to private property is already one in which private property is estranged from itself, meaning that what we believe we own is deprived and excluded also from us. The abstraction into money, therefore, represents the alienation of private property.
With this we can approach another key negation, which abstraction through money seems to contribute to as well, one that relates directly to the notion of subjectivity proposed here. That is the in-dividual. This term holds a double meaning – it refers to something being indivisible, a singular thing that cannot be divided, but it also indicates separateness, as in the term individualism: at the same time inseparable from oneself and separated from the rest. Therefore, the individual, the cornerstone of liberal, deliberative representational worldviews, is in itself a negation – but a negation of what? We can say that the actual thing that is already there is the dividual. That which is always already part of something else.
When Deleuze outlines the dividual in “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” he uses it to denote the collapse of the individual. In this late text, Deleuze describes a shift from the Foucauldian disciplinary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This order, which Deleuze explains is analogical to the prison, proposed itself through the organization of vast spaces of enclosure: Individuals are always going from one closed site to another, each with its own laws: first of all the family, then school (“you’re not at home, you know”), then the barracks (“you’re not at school, you know”), then the factory, hospital from time to time, maybe prison, the model site of confinement. With the shift to the societies of control, Deleuze says the crisis that occurs involves all environments of enclosure: prison, hospital, factory, school, and family. These environments of enclosure seep into one another – you never finish school, you never leave the family, you never finish the army, and you are never out of the hospital, never out of prison, never out of the factory. What Deleuze is describing is the life of the overqualified generation – always in school, always in debt, always dependent on family, always recruited, always in need of medication, always unemployed or in between jobs, but at the same time working endlessly.
Deleuze describes the dividual as a product of The Societies of Control in which “the key thing is no longer a signature or number but a code.” Much before laptops and smartphones Deleuze’s direct reference for this realization was the ATM: “We’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’”
The dividual for Deleuze is this dissected entity, roaming through networks. We can find useful the fact that we are faced with a conceptualization of subjectivities that do not circle around the separated, indivisible entity (i.e., the in-dividual). Converged through production protocols and the debt economy, the dividual is in constant negotiation. A non-fixed and mobile flow, always partial, the dividual is in the process of subjectivation. Not an entity unto itself apart from all the rest, but rather already in relation. The dividual is a subjectivity that is always already part of a presence. Structured under the conditions of the society of control, the dividual actually holds a resistive potential within its logic.
Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera, defined the political construction of self-determination in relation to the potentials of social labour materialized in the commodity, in a compelling way, saying that “Capital unfolds the potential of social labour only as abstraction, as forces that are constantly subordinated and castrated by the rationality of value of the commodity.” But the fact that these tendencies may emerge is actually a threat to capital, therefore, enabling these potentials of social labour to flourish “is an issue of labour over and against capital, on the basis of what capital has done thus far.”
When we take into account the fetish – from king to commodity – we follow the tracks of the making of the in-dividual. As with the fetish, the in-dividual operates here with the formulation of a whole that presents itself to itself as a separated being inseparable from itself. The commodity provides us with a site of the dividual. Being the materialization of our social relations, the commodity folds in itself the ever-shifting omnipresence of our shared dividuality and its connectedness. With a dialectic understanding of the commodity, we can see how through it we can actualize the potentials of the overqualified. Our social relations can be activated through a reading of the commodity against the economic and political logic in which it was produced.
When writing on Sergei Eisenstein cinema, Deleuze describes how it achieves to “reach the Dividual, that is, to individuate a mass as such, instead of leaving it in a qualitative homogeneity or reducing it to a quantitive divisibility.” This Soviet framing of the Dividual, therefore, can be a way for us to further investigate this form of divided subjectivities which are constituted in, around, and through the commodity and the potentials of social labour that it traps.
Paper presented in Melbourne at the VI Conference on New Materialisms, 29.09.2015