[Reader-list] residues

[Mimeticus]

Allow me slightly to complicate the discussion on residues, if I may...

We are accustomed to the idea of capitalism producing a residue, an Other, an excess that, in the fullness of the revolutionary moment, might turn around and insist upon its Hegelian destiny as master, not slave. Or, in a more post-Marxian vein, that might serve as a foundation for 'different' modes of thinking the political. 

But it seems to me that while this is not wrong, it also misses something absolutely crucial about capitalism which is that capitalism must at once affirm and deny the material from which it draws value. Once again, we are accustomed to thinking that this affirmation is a conditional one, that only those kinds of difference that are valorizable, commodifiable, are 'recognized' by capital. And on that basis, the 'excess' continues to haunt the process of valorization, continues to suggest the possibility of collapse. 

Let's push this idea a little bit further and think about what happens when we are not simply thinking in terms of the good old Marxian topos of the labour process as the source of exchange value, but also about the kind of collective imaginative work that goes into valorizing many of the commodities and images that we consume. Desiring, viewing, moving through the commodity spaces of the city - all these are a kind of labour, each of them crucial to the possibility of contemporary capital's reproduction, it's self-valorization.

Where is the "residue" now? Does it exist as a repressed desire, waiting to unsettle the regimes of fantasy that we subscribe to, as readily interpellated consumer-subjects? Or has it become a crucial authorizing component of the valorization process, as the lacuna at the heart of the commodity form compels both desire and doubt? In that case, what would an "alternative" scenario look like? What structure of desire, of imagination would not involve such an ambivalence? 

Mimeticus





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