Today’s post is a reply to Robin James’ post, which raises questions stemming from the observations made in Jodi Dean’s recent post on “What Comes After Real Subsumption?”

This might be a tad “incompatible” with the existing discussion because while the discussion so far has focused mainly on a Marxist approach to a series of philosophical questions, I want to take an anarchist approach to an anthropological re-reading of the initial question: “what comes after real subsumption?” That is, I think some of the subsequent questions might be more answerable if we interrogate their anthropological facets. Particularly, I want to focus on what is considered feedstock for production and what is identified as the act of consumption which, by definition, must yield a waste that capitalists sort through in an effort to extract more surplus value. Pigs in shit as it were. 

It’s worth noting on the outset, as a sort of reflexive recursion of my own hypothesis, that this post performs what it will try to describe. All the way from the W.W. Norton Company tangentially benefiting from my (gosh, now over three years) writing for Cyborgology to the fact that as a cis-white male I took it upon myself to make my own post instead of contributing to a comment thread.

With that being said, here’s my hypothesis: All the points at which we say something to the effect of “x produces y” we are also saying that there is a ready and willing consumer base willing to pay the exchange rate for the produced y. The bringing about of real, and perhaps later absolute, subsumption itself as a historical category depends on us seeing ourselves as primarily a particular kind of producer and consumer. Capitalists must produce consumers as well as consumables. Whether it be pearl-clutching Nation authors looking to get a cover story on the backs of black women using twitter, or men’s rights activists looking for a readily (perhaps even in the Heideggerian sense, standing reserve) available victim served up in a mainstream news source as the not-quite-innocent-enough woman that can be blamed for their own assault; there needs to be someone ready to ingest new levels of toxicity.

To borrow neoliberal economists’ terminology, I think we need to pay as much attention to the demand side as we’re paying to the supply side. In doing so, I think we’re forced to deal with the heart of capitalisms resiliency: its ability to refer to itself to find new arenas of expansion and as a justification for its existence. In other words, capitalism produces instances in which its most destructive capacities are seen as natural and thus insurmountable, and thus we feel as though the only way to make real and sustaining change is to act “within” the system and wield these natural forces. Why else would so many people looking to make the world more “sustainable” seek out jobs where actually increase the efficiency of systems so as to increase the pace of resource extraction? Why else would this process of reclaiming the refuse of previous destructive capitalist endeavors be seen as sustainable at all?  Why else would big data seem worth it in the first place?

This is a leap, but hear me out on this: Absolute subsumption then, is subject to a kind of Gramscian hegemony contract. That is, we agree to call ourselves consumers and producers in just the right instances, because benefits us in the moment. For example, agreeing that something is natural and thus inevitable can also give us a pass when we don’t want to take responsibility for something we have done. This is the exact move that is made to dismiss rape culture and blame the victim. We agree to call ourselves consumers when we buy a computer or even when we use social media even though we are producing more things than we are consuming. We are making new ideas (blog posts!) and making new connections that do actual productive work. They also impose a kind of control over other people. The contract I make with the hegemonic discourse harms other people while benefiting me. The contract is highly contingent, but the cumulative effect is the making compatible of toxic assets with yet-unidentified consumers. Let us also not forget that the act of consumption is both a destruction (that produces wastes) but also an absorption. We become a little toxic in the act of consuming. I suspect that is where resiliency, in part, comes from. It’s a desensitizing as much as it is an inoculation.

I suspect that the answer to James’ second question, (“What about human capital that’s ‘such a waste that it’s no longer worth trying to do anything with it’? How are people produced as ‘the non-capitalizable remainder that lacks potential’? Is this remainder not the proletariat, but blackness?”) sits somewhere in the complicity with hegemony and the willingness to call ourselves consumers when we are primarily doing is producing. We are producing the non-capitalizable remainder. We are producing toxics that, ultimately, are nothing more than an escrow account for future capitalist production.

Now as I ­—admittedly perhaps too often— like to do, I’ll quote David Graeber[1] as a conclusion and kind of prescriptive:

If we wish to continue applying terms borrowed from political economy … [i.e. consumption] it might be more enlightening to start looking at what we have been calling the “consumption” sphere rather as the sphere of the production of human beings, not just as labor power but as persons, internalized nexes of meaningful social relations, because after all, this is what social life is actually about, the production of people (of which the production of things is simply a subordinate moment), and it is only the very unusual organization of capitalism that makes it even possible for us to imagine otherwise?