The movement into immateriality is important in two ways. This means then that Capital can territorialise material objects and, fundamentally for Negri and Hardt’s analysis, immaterial objects. With Negri and Hardt as well as Žižek, the boundaries of this reterritorialisation are in theory infinite. The capitalist aims to turn whatever he or she can into a commodity, in order to extract this wealth from the object of production. Commodification here is the important term. The point of this ‘reterritorialisation’ is to place this area of productivity within a field of exploitation as a means for the Capitalist to extract wealth. To put this into Deleuzian terminology, it is the worker that opens up the spaces and deterritorialises, but it is the capitalist who “axiomises the decoded flows and reterritorialises the deterritorialised flow”. This form of ‘imperialism’ occurs in many different realms, either geographically with the movement of imperialism (the expansion of control of commodities across the globe) or in terms new productive spaces opened up by the creativity of the worker. As Deleuze and Guattari point out in Anti-Oedipus, Capital deterritorialises and reterritorialises. Through the greater scope of Capitalist accumulation, new areas and territories can be subsumed within the Capitalist territory. Value is increasingly sought from areas that traditionally were on the outside. As well as deepening, the Capitalist also widens his areas of interest. As the Capitalist drives for greater and greater accumulation of Capital, he requires his workers to become more and more productive. What is most important to this analysis though, is the Capitalist’s necessity to innovate. Thus we have Capital as a vampiric figure in a parasitic relationship to labour the process of changing money into Capital, that is the addition of value into circulation of money, necessitates the involvement of a surplus-value. The Capitalist, in order to accumulate greater Capital, requires this labour-time. Essentially the Capitalist mystification of production, that strange movement of money that begets more money, is in fact based upon a system where the worker’s productive abilities are appropriated for the progression of Capital. Thus he or she no longer simply produces the quantity for him or herself, but enough for the expansion of Capital. The labourer no longer produces for himself, but for Capital. By getting the worker to produce more than he can himself consume, the Capitalist can extract a ‘surplus-value’. As a root for each of the thinkers, Marx contended that value is borne through human activity. To begin this essay, it is important to see what this theory of subsumption is and how it constructs how the different thinkers have approached the limit of Capital. Thus I aim to show how Žižek demands a return of agency to re-politicise the mass of working people across the world in order for us to break out of the loop of Capitalist subsumption. By contrasting Negri and Hardt with Žižek, I wish to show how not only they have been wrong when considering the immanent contradictions in capital, but how their failure inversely feeds back into Capitalist subsumption and reproduction. However, in the next section I will explain how the two theories diverge fundamentally on the question of immanent contradiction. Essentially both theories emerge from an understanding of Marx. I will do this by first explaining how Negri, Hardt and Žižek look at Capital’s subsumption of productive labour. Thus I aim to contrast Negri and Hardt’s disavowed determinism with Žižek’s Leninism. In this essay my aim is to show how both of the two competing theories of Capitalist subsumption of production in the end make for the two very different theories of the limits of Capital. For Žižek the opposite applies the contradictions immanent to capitalism create the very basis for its existence. To put it simply, for Negri and Hardt, the contradictions that are immanent to capitalism produce its destruction. Past the two competing sets of theoretical jargon they use, at the heart is a differing diagnosis of the nature and limitations of Capital. However, a more detailed analysis points to a radical difference between them. Essentially for all the writers, Capital ruins people’s lives. They both start from Marx, claim that the real battle today is still against Capital and fight against the post-political realm of ordering and administration. If one is to superficially gaze over both arguments, it would seem that Negri and Hardt and Žižek are batting for the same team.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |