Mimetic accumulation: Marx,Foucault,and Adorno in and with Federici’s Caliban and the Witch

Introduction

Silvia Federici positions her seminal work in the tradition of Marxist scholarship on the origin of capital, though with two key additions: rethinking it from a feminist viewpoint and with a desire to understand the present reiterations of its originary violence. As such, she positions Marx and Foucault together (in a tense relationship, to be sure) to understand both the function of capital's accumulation and its influence on the—especially female—body. Her appropriation of the two theorists’ concepts is undoubtedly a key theoretical addition of the text, and thus the primary source of my focus. Firstly, I draw out Federici's productive tension with Marx on the issues of the primacy of violence, (re)production, and the accumulation of difference in Capital Volume 1, arguing that Marx is not nearly as far away from her position as she posits. From the relation of Marx and Federici, we can derive what we might term the dialectical double helix of violence and economic compulsion that constitutes a central feature of both Capital and Caliban and the Witch (hereafter Caliban), one which will abound in importance with the later additions of mimesis. Next, I consider Federici's relation to Foucault, a thinker from whom Federici much more selectively extracts; positioning her against Foucault on the conquering of the body, cogito, and witch hunts reveals Federici's predominate Marxism and, importantly, the centrality of the dialectic for her theory of accumulation. Now armed with the centrality of the dialectic, the Marxist double helix, and a vision of the role of the body, I situate Adorno as a clarificatory foil for Federici in her theorization of accumulation (of difference). Despite their similarities, a tension between their theories of mimesis quickly emerges, one that reveals Federici's rejection of a proper dialectic at the very end of Caliban that calls into question her entire discussion of primitive accumulation's perpetuity writ large. Against Federici, then, I posit the existence of what I call “mimetic accumulation” that combines her numerous magnificent insights with an Adornian theory of mimesis to describe the process of continuing primitive accumulation that she rightly describes as a crucial feature of capital's perpetuation. The 500-year-old epigraph from Thomas Müntzer in the first chapter of Caliban is, we will see, exactly the retroactive and prospective vision of the function and existence of mimetic accumulation: “All the world must suffer a big jolt. There will be such a game that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats, and the downtrodden will rise” (Federici, 2004: 21).

Marx's Helix

Glossing Federici's exposition on English primitive accumulation and the transition to capitalism leaves the reader unsure whether they are indeed reading Federici or have instead accidentally opened the last 100 pages of Capital. In the last chapters of Capital, Marx—via his Hegelianism, writing that “reflection begins post festum”—returns to the question of origin only after understanding the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of the phenomenon and movement of the commodity: “so-called primitive accumulation,” Marx says, is the secret to the origin of capitalism, a process deriving not from the spontaneous generation of the productive capitalist out of the unproductive masses but rather through violent expropriation and compulsion, a history “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (1976: 168, 875). The growth of capital from the ruins of the destruction it engendered, now “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” finds its subsequent ideological obfuscation in the mechanization of its processes through the impersonal mute compulsion of the market (926). It is what we might call this dialectical double helix of violence and impersonal compulsion that, as for Marx, can be read in(to) Federici's understanding of primitive accumulation and its various manifestations—a centrality, indeed, that Federici extends to properly reckon with the role of women and of the accumulation of difference.

Although “many Marxists,” Federici writes, “identify capitalist accumulation with the liberation of the worker, female or male” and thus downplay the originary character of violence, Federici's Marx remains largely separated from those who now bear the moniker of his philosophy (Federici, 2004: 64). Despite Federici's hesitation to analogize her focus on violence with Marx's because of his tie to a potentially eschatologically justifying teleology, she remains deeply indebted to his exposition on its originary character; indeed, the extent to which Marx fails to recognize the perpetuity of this violence—Federici writes that “he also assumed that violence … would recede with the maturing of capitalist relations”—brings us into contention with Federici's reading (12). It is, Federici says, precisely the mistaken assumption that the “freeing” of the worker implicates any liberation that would have been rectified if Marx “looked at [capitalism's] history from the viewpoint of women” (13). A reconsideration of this development from this viewpoint is exactly the rewriting that clarifies the dually originary and reproductive character of violence, a “dialectics of accumulation and destruction” that cycles ad infinitum (13, 17). Federici's theoretical engagement with Marx is therefore on three grounds: the primacy of violence, the reproduction of production, and the universalization or accumulation of difference.

Marx's famous and explicit depictions of blood-soaked nascent capital are, Federici notes, indicative of the originary role of violence in primitive accumulation. Marx's frequent ironic reference to the “idyllic methods of [the political economist's] primitive accumulation” explicitly contrasts with his depiction of the “spoilation,” “fraudulent alienation,” “theft,” “usurpation,” and “expropriation” of the privatization process that created the “free and rightless proletarians” (Marx, 1976: 895). Federici's critique finds this description of the new “freedom” of the worker particularly distressing and indicative of Marx's teleology: it is, she says, an example of Marx's dual theses on the freedom from the violence of the feudal relation and the liberation-inclined movement of the capitalist mode of production (Federici, 2004: 63–64). For Marx, though, the irony of “idyllic” is layered as (or more) heavily here: the free workers are now “free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own” such that they may become wholly enslaved to the iterating separation of themselves from the conditions of labor's realization (Marx, 1976: 874). ¹ Just as, Marx says, the dialectic in Hegel must be turned to stand on its feet, so when capitalist production “stands on its own feet” do its enslaving processes become “reproduce[d] … on a constantly extending scale” (874). The “freedom” of the worker, then, is synonymous with their violence-begetting “unprotected and rightless” status; the dialectic of freedom is thus both the enslaving freedom of their reduction to a commodity and the liberating freedom of their movement in the dialectic of capitalist relations condemned in their “transitory existence” to self-destruction (876, 739). Despite Marx's recognition of the reproduction of the enslavement, Federici's concern manifests in the latter aspect of the dialectic: if, as she asks, violence is perpetually iterative, can there be a teleological dialectic toward liberation?

Here, a return to Marx is in order. Federici writes that, for Marx, the violence of primitive accumulation “would recede with the maturing of capitalist relations,” a movement certainly stressed by Marx himself: “In the ordinary run of things” after the successful creation of capitalist relations, the proletariat are controlled by the “silent compulsion of economic relations” and are only infrequently subject to the kinds of explicit violence (“extra-economic force”) present in the original expropriation—one surmises that Federici had this page open when writing her critique (899). To derive this direction of movement from Marx, though, is to severely limit a view of the complexity of the dialectical double helix he constructs. The classic Althusserian distinction between ideological and repressive power—or even an updated version with what Søren Mau calls “economic power”—misses precisely this dialectic: as Marx himself writes, force, the “midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,” thereby the driving force of primitive accumulation, “is itself an economic power” (Althusser, 2014: 244; Marx, 1976: 916). It is, of course, in “veiled form” where the originary violence exists in developed capitalist relations, but in a form nonetheless; primitive accumulation, then, is always-already economic power for the same reason that the chapter on the origin of the capitalist mode of production was written at the conclusion of Capital: only in the conclusion of its phenomenality can its originary and perpetually present constitutive elements become visible (Marx, 1976: 713). “Every social process of production,” Marx writes, “is at the same time a process of reproduction,” such that the conditions and constitutive elements of the process of production—what Federici identifies as the violence of primitive accumulation—perpetually iterate (even in transformed manifestations) in the process of reproduction under economic compulsion (711). Just as force conditions the movement to the new conditions of production, so capital “forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live”: indeed, because “the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist,” the worker (qua individual worker and Worker in a universal sense) was always-already born in primitive accumulation, a fact only retroactively recognizable in the force of economic compulsion (723). Marx, in fact, might agree with Federici's claim, one created to be the strongest polemic against him: “A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization” (Federici, 2004: 12).

Despite the dialectic embedded in Marx's double helix of violence and economic relations, Federici's critique of Marx's teleology (despite any concerns about its exactitude) indicts him as in fact much farther from Hegel than her. The “transition” to the capitalist mode of production, in contrast to Marx's claim that “the dissolution of [the economic structure of feudal society] set free the elements of [the economic structure of capitalist society],” is “in many ways a fiction” in Federici's reading: the term “transition,” insofar as it implies a linear progression, conceals the “bloodiest and most discontinuous [period] in world history” (Federici, 2004: 62; Marx, 1976: 875). Indeed, the singular process of accumulation Marx describes fails to recognize the omnipresence of revolt, the role of the state and its terror campaigns, the varying forms of colonization/expropriation based on region, and the role of gendered violence; most of all, though, it remains attached to a dialectical teleology that Federici finds most objectionable (Federici, 2004: 62–63). For Marx, to overcome capitalism is to overcome contradiction (or antagonism): the bourgeois relation of production is, as he says, “the last antagonistic form of the social process of production,” a stage which, like ascribing man's power to divine origins in a religious stage, “cannot be avoided” on the path to a higher non-contradiction (Marx, 1976: 990; 1904: 13). Marx structures an analogy to Hegel's Phenomenology here: the sublation of “Religion” apotheosizes in “Absolute Knowing,” a section which, in a totalizing Marxist reading, ends in the non-contradiction of Spirit's absolute self-identity (Hegel, 1977: 479). Federici's reading, though, would be quite similar to Todd McGowan's in Emancipation after Hegel: the meaning of Absolute Knowing is to reconcile with—not resolve—the inescapability of contradiction (McGowan, 2019: 21). The self-sundering of Spirit's self-knowing—or, better put, the restless negativity of Spirit—is precisely antagonism's intractability; in Federici, this intractability exists in the non-progression of capitalism's liberation: in its more “brutal and insidious forms of enslavement,” capital has imposed and inculcated “deep divisions” in all forms of social life, imposing also a dialectic whose polymorphous teleology mimics its polymorphous creation (Federici, 2004: 64; Hegel, 1977: 485, 491). The owl of Minerva is sure of only one futural certainty: the continuity of antagonism, not liberation via and from antagonism.

The birth of the W/worker in primitive accumulation as its original antagonism is the grounds for Federici's third major intervention: her critique of Marx's universalization of the worker at the expense of the understanding of a gender-based accumulation of difference. For Federici, the attack on women was both instrumental and targeted with the expropriation of the womb and the witch hunts as a crushing of women's liberatory efforts, respectively. Marx, it seems, only accounted for part of the instrumental control thesis. Quoting John Fielden's The Curse of the Factory System, Marx writes that the master—“i.e., the child-stealer”—works “the children to the utmost” as apprentices, a division of labor eliciting particularly cruel “mental and bodily degradation” as it reproduces itself into an adulthood of repetitious, stagnated labor (Marx, 1976: 615–616, 923). In line with Federici, Marx notes that the creation of the proletariat required forceful expropriation of the children into workers in 16th-century England via laws that gave “the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and keep them as apprentices” and, ultimately, as slaves (897). The other side of the dialectical double helix, the compulsion of the market, functions simultaneously to accumulate child labor: the means of subsistence maintained the individual worker's existence and allowed “this race of peculiar-commodity owners” to “perpetuate its presence on the market” via birthing children (275). The children, then, owing to ideological protestations of the vice of idleness, could be exploited just as much or more than their adult counterparts: the father became a “slave-dealer” who sells off the dexterous labor of his wife and children and simultaneously had their resistance to capital's despotism broken by the imposition of machinic domination over his family (337, 519, 526). As Federici writes, the place of the woman in the transition to capitalism should be understood primarily as a source of new labor and a division in the working class: in Marx, then, is a nascent analysis of Federici's subtitle—Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation—insofar as the capitalist desired to enslave the child for their lesser-required means of subsistence, thereby constructing a master out of the husband/father (himself dominated by capital) that, altogether, enslaved the woman to a life of (biological-)reproduction-for-capital—“women,” Federici states, “themselves became the commons” (Federici, 2004: 97). A universalization of the proletariat, then, a proletariat which brings to mind “male waged workers,” elides an understanding of the constant difference and fracturing in the masses of the oppressed via the perpetually iterative double helix; here is where Federici stakes her theoretical claim (16).

Applying the dialectical double helix as a hermeneutic extends the equation of “the accumulation of misery … to the accumulation of wealth” to the divisions in the working class created by capital (Marx, 1976: 799). There are, as we saw, the fractures in gender and age in the family that make it a tool of capital's reproduction, leading to the famous call in the Manifesto for its abolition; this is, Federici implies, a result of both sides of the helix: the violence of the enclosures set forth the movements to the money-economy (and, subsequently, the patriarchy of the wage) that sealed the working class in economic compulsion (Federici, 2004: 74; Marx and Engels, 1978: 487). Federici's frequent use of the word “dependence” (of both the male worker and the female non-worker) in these economic relations implicates Marx's analysis of formal subsumption and mute compulsion into the analysis of the accumulation of difference, a place where Marx indeed comes closest to her (Federici, 2004: 72–75). The formal subsumption—“capital [taking] over an available, established labour process” and its relations—exacerbates the “compulsion to perform surplus labour” such that a “new relation of supremacy and subordination” is created between the workers and “the small capitalists who differ only slightly from the workers”; this is, indeed, a proto-definition of the accumulation of difference, though Federici's takes as its issue Marx's sentence just before this: “In consequence the process of exploitation is stripped of every patriarchal, political or even religious cloak” (Marx, 1976: 1021, 1026–1027). For Federici, the formal subsumption of the patriarchy from feudal relations was not only maintained but invigorated under the newfound domination of capital, now entrenching the patriarchy of the wage as an employment of the double helix for the compulsion of all members and divisions of the proletariat (Federici, 2004: 98).

The body of capital

If Federici took from Marx an understanding of the technologies of capital, then she took from Foucault an understanding of the technologies of the body. Even still, Federici's Foucault is more the Foucault of Madness and Civilization than Discipline and Punish or The History of Sexuality, and much more than The Order of Things: while the debates about the repressiveness/productivity of power and the construction of the body remain vitally important, Federici's ability to read a central dialectic in Madness and Civilization—one which is otherwise obscured or outright expelled in Foucault's later works—coupled with its focus on confinement renders it her central text. ² Federici's analysis centers more around the Other—what Foucault describes as the object of a “history of madness”—than of the Same, the project of a history of (the) order (of things); indeed, though, to quote Homi Bhabha, Federici's Other is that which is “almost the same, but not quite,” a not-quite that fuels the (primitive) accumulation of difference in capital (Bhabha, 1994: 86; Foucault, 1994: xxiv). In a properly Foucauldian style, though always with her Marxism predominating, Federici moves from Marx to the body as a microcosm of the micro- and macro-powers at work, and thus as a microcosm of primitive accumulation's perpetuity on three grounds: the conquering of the body of the proletariat as seen in Caliban, the dialectic of Cogito, and the role of capital in confinement and the witch hunts.

The late Foucault's emphasis on the productivity of power paradoxically unites with the otherwise repressive hypothesis of orthodox Marxism insofar as they both implicate the conquering of the alien (nation); that is, the body (Foucault, 1978: 10–11). The Marxian alienation that produces the alien thus repetitiously conquered in the proliferation of capital is, indeed, the jump from Marx to Foucault: Federici's Foucault finds this alien in the body of the proletaria(t/n), “the great Caliban of the time” (Federici, 2004: 154). The body exists in the exact same double helix as before, a site which must be originarily primitively accumulated—since “peasants and artisans did not peacefully agree to work for a wage”—and, upon the creation of its docility, iterates in a unified Foucauldian juridico-disciplinary form of power (136). For Federici, the ideological bricolage necessary for the production of docility centered around the body as evil, as dangerous, and as potential labor-power. Consider, for example, Prospero and Stephano's definitions of Caliban (Federici's titular reference) in Shakespeare's The Tempest as “a thing of darkness,” a “servant monster,” an alien, unproductive being, embodied only by “lewdness, idleness, [and] systematic dissipation of one's vital energies” (Federici, 2004: 134; Shakespeare, 2009: 54–55, 85). ³ The productivity of power was, of course, the production of productivity for capital: the productivity both of the individual body and of the children produced by the captured womb—as Federici writes, “nakedness was penalized, as were many other ‘unproductive’ forms of sexuality” that implicated the evilness of the unconquered body (137). This evilness was intimately connected to fear, particularly of the women who often led the resistance to such accumulation: like the execution of Damiens in Discipline and Punish, fear suggested sovereign impotence—Prospero fears a repeat of Caliban's attempt “to violate / The honor of my child”—and required violence for its assuagement (“I’ll rack thee with old cramps, / Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar”) (Foucault, 1979: 47; Shakespeare, 2009: 26–27). As seen in Marx, the control of the womb is altogether a recognition of the body as “a container of labor-power,” or, in Foucauldian language, “an instrument of [power's] exercise,” both “perfectly individualized”—in the accumulation of difference—“and constantly visible” to the mute compulsion of capital (Federici, 2004: 138; Foucault, 1979: 170, 200). This is, Federici says, the “vivisection” of the human (and) body such that, in sum, it was not the Marxian weaving loom nor the steam engine that defined capitalism's arrival and first instrument, but instead the human body (2004: 140, 146).

The principal ideological antagonists of Federici's dissection of the dissection are Hobbes and (particularly) Descartes, reminiscent of the emphasis Foucault gave to the Cartesian cogito and dualism as the harbinger and impetus of the conquering of the Other in Madness and Civilization. As Federici writes, drawing heavily on Foucault, the “conflict between Reason and the Body” in which the order of the former sought to dominate the chaos of the latter was fought on the terrain of the body, creating a dialectic indicative of the broader dialectic of capital in which the former battle was situated and created (Federici, 2004: 134). Foucault maintains, for example, that the passions were “the meeting ground of the body and soul,” a classical Cartesian dyad, and that “the possibility of madness is … implicit in the very phenomenon of passion,” suggesting in the existence of madness at the heart of Reason's cogito (Foucault, 1965: 86, 88). Read dialectically, Foucault's analogy between the relation of unreason-to-dazzlement and reason-to-daylight implicates the nothing of the being which the madman sees in his delirium-dazzlement, a nothing pointing to the nothing of madness at the heart of reason and to the failure of the “great exorcism of madness” that is the Cartesian formula of doubt (Foucault, 1965: 108–109). From the mechanical philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes, aimed at reducing the body to an inert, controllable entity, rose “a new bourgeois spirit” that orders and rationalizes the Other, “intensifying its subjection but … maximizing its social utility”: Hobbesian state centralization and Cartesian individual decentralization are, indeed, a movement identical in form to the scaffold → prison in Foucault and primitive accumulation → mute compulsion in Marx (Federici, 2004: 139). The colluding simultaneity of the Hobbesian and Cartesian approaches, though, indicates again Federici's non-linearity, hinted at already by the unreason at the heart of reason and its conquering drive.

In the climatic event of the witch hunts, one finds Federici's deep Marxism and her most significant departure from Foucault. Taking a cue from the Foucauldian “Great Confinement,” an “instance of order” with the desire to “reduce [madness] to silence” and administer morality like “trade or economy,” Federici likens the tripartite function of the witch hunts—deepening gender divisions, creating a fear of women, and destroying anti-capitalist customs and subjects—to such methods of primitive accumulation as the confinement of vagabonds and paupers (Federici, 2004: 165; Foucault, 1965: 38, 40, 61). Interestingly, Foucault comes much closer to Federici's Marxism with the confinement: as one of the attempted solutions to the 17th-century economic crisis, Foucault notes the focus on “giving work to those who had been confined” and “making them contribute to the prosperity of all” while instilling a moral sense of the value of work, though a morality that was “indissociably economic” (1965: 51, 57). It is still this sense of morality—as indeed indicative of power relations—where Federici departs most strongly: power as a quasi-metaphysical “Prime Mover” in the Foucauldian universal disallows his recognition of historical phenomenon like the witch hunts which “undoubtedly … would have inspired different conclusions had they been included” (Federici, 2004: 15–16). Those “different conclusions” are precisely the differentiated function/effect of primitive accumulation and the omnipresence of capital's impetus. The “diabolical crimes of the witches,” Federici writes, are nothing more than the resistance of class struggle, emblematic of the broader phenomenon of the witch hunts as an attack on women's resistance, autonomy, and futurity: “It was a class war carried out by other means” (170–171, 176). This war, though, did not follow conventional laws of combat: despite an ostensible lack of direct provocation, the state was threatened by the refusal of work and authority—indeed, a refusal of productivity—that the enhancement of magic implied (174). It should be no surprise, then, that the witch hunts attempted to “place the female body … at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor-power”; as we have seen in both Marx and Foucault, the logics remain consistent. There was, indeed, a uniquely biopolitical approach, evidenced in the lamentations of “the first economists of capitalist society” that “so many bodies were wasted on the gallows,” that adds Federici's Marxism as the motor for the changes Foucault sees in the discursive movements of sexuality and punishment (137). It is, though, a peculiar movement, one requiring a much more thorough analysis: we come now to perhaps the central quotation of Federici's text, that the witch hunts were an instance of “ ‘going back’ [as] a means of stepping forward” in the onward march of perpetual primitive accumulation (203). With this enters Adorno.

Mimesis and/as/with accumulation

Foucault (1991) once remarked of the Frankfurt School that “perhaps if I had read those works earlier on, I would have saved useful time” (119); one thinks, then, of the similarities between Madness and Civilization and Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly their chapter “The Concept of Enlightenment.” A reader familiar with Adorno's work will have already noticed the innumerable parallels with Caliban; here, though, the parallels function only to highlight the broader divergence between Federici and Adorno on mimesis that will make all the difference for a theory of accumulation to be derived from Federici's efforts. Thinking through Adorno on art, Enlightenment, and mimesis in conjunction with Federici is clarificatory primarily for the subterranean currents and contradictions of Caliban. As such, from the movement of Adorno's concept of mimesis through Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aesthetic Theory and its disconnect with Federici's theory of accumulation we derive what one might call “mimetic accumulation,” the thrust of Caliban that only needs the stimulus of a contrast to enter the clearing of acknowledgment.

What exactly Adorno means by mimesis, particularly in how the concept changes and develops in his work, would require a paper of its own to elucidate fully; indeed, mimesis and the non-identical definitionally resist definition. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the site of Adorno's first large-scale exposition on it, mimesis is often paired with the phenomena of both pre-Enlightenment myth and fascist appropriation, a seemingly far cry from the radical potential of mimesis described in Aesthetic Theory. Mimetic behavior, Adorno and Horkheimer write, is “the organic adaptation to otherness” in “the magical phase,” a phase of myth and mythology; it is in this phase where the relation to reality is one of reality as a whole, a reality in which one recognizes oneself as entirely immersed in “the eternity of the actual” in all its repetitions, fates, and movements (2002: 148, 20). As (largely) antithetical to the instrumental abstraction of Enlightenment that seeks a “liquidation” of objects, mimesis and myth stand in a non-subsuming, immersive relation to the object, elsewhere described as a sort of “oneness (9, 38). The magician, for example, in a mimesis that “makes itself resemble its surroundings,” attempts to imitate and impersonate demons to gain control over them, already a proto-Enlightenment attitude toward nature (152, 6). Whereas myth defines itself by its non-identity—perhaps even un-identity—insofar as there exists a primordial oneness, Enlightenment retreats to an identity in the self that is radically opposed to the non-identical around it (70). This myth-mimesis as imitation and immersion, though, contains the same underbelly as the Enlightenment which it both is and precedes: fascist rallies, the Führer's frenetic rantings, and the battle cries of the Nazis were “organized imitations of magical practices, the mimesis of mimesis,” what they describe as a “reverse of genuine mimesis” that maintains the totalitarianism of Enlightenment's control of the non-identical in/as nature (152). In (fascist) civilization, mimesis is repressively controlled, manipulated, and sublimated: for Adorno, drawing implicitly on Benjamin, it is the angel of progress wielding a fiery sword that drives out Benjamin's Angelus Novus, the viewer of the piling of the debris of historical wreckage who desires its restitution as a reclamation with the openness of the non-identical past (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 148; Benjamin, 1968: 257–258). Indeed, the repressed threat of nature's power mimetically returns in the “permanent, organized compulsion” of Enlightenment instrumental rationality, a compulsion that is both a supersession and reversion (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 150).

In Aesthetic Theory, arguably Adorno's magnum opus, the possibility of a fascistic subsumption of mimesis is almost entirely subordinated to an exaltation of its radical power; in contrast to his own famous quote from Minima Moralia that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” Adorno declares in Aesthetic Theory that the mimetic vestige is “the plenipotentiary of an undamaged life in the midst of mutilated life” (1997: 117, 2020: 43). In the administered world, the individual subject—the Enlightenment automaton abstracted from the oneness of nature—finds it impossible to “lose himself, forget himself, extinguish himself in the artwork,” the medium that is “the organ of mimesis” since the instantiation of the mimetic taboo, a taboo against nature that is “a keystone of bourgeois ontology” (Adorno, 1997: 17, 110, 114). The form of the dialectic of enlightenment remerges in the immanent dialectic of rationality and mimesis in art that exists primarily in mimetic comportment, “an attitude toward reality distinct from the fixated antithesis of subject and object,” a non-subsumption of the other into the synthesis of the concept (110, 54). This, indeed, merges with the central thesis of Negative Dialectics: the non-identity of identity and non-identity is apotheosized in mimesis (Adorno, 1973: 120). Self-immersion as mimetic comportment is a process, then, to recognize the self in the Other, and thus the non-identity of the identity of the self and (of) the Other. Still, this mimesis-as-openness is shackled to the nature-dominating ratio insofar as it requires constructive rationality for its comprehension; paradoxically, “the opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination” insofar as the comportment of domination is the comportment of (a disentangled?) Enlightenment rationality, the latter as that to which art must assimilate for any possibly radical mimesis (Adorno, 1997: 289). To be sure, this assimilation is the condition of what, to Adorno, is art's most radical property: the potential for a “mimesis of the hardened and alienated” that refuses the refusal of a “mute reality,” allowing the silenced non-identical to finally speak (21). In the “involuntary comportment” of the mimetic shudder, the subject realizes the totalization of the non-identical and posits it retroactively as the movement of history; it is here where Adorno adds to Federici (118, 245).

An otherwise doubting reader should by this point have their fear of a tenuous link between Adorno and Federici altogether placated; despite the inexistence of Adorno citations in Caliban, the overlaps on questions of the Other, repetition, subsumption, compulsion, and the dialectic are innumerable. The alien Other, a concern with which instantiates the centrality of the fetish character of the commodity in the Adornian universe, figures predominantly in the intersection of Federici and Adorno: for both, magic and demonology are the primary synecdoche. Witchcraft, enshrined as solely a female crime by demonologists, was entirely consistent with the great confinement and conquering of the Other taking place via capital and via Foucauldian logics; indeed, it was the demonologists who were the primary instigators of their persecution (Federici, 2004: 168, 179). According to Federici, Francis Bacon—among the central villains of Dialectic of Enlightenment—modeled his method “of the scientific investigation of nature”—and thus its conquering—“on the interrogation of witches under torture” (203). Federici, like Adorno, recognizes the “ideological bricolage” of the structure created to condone domination as in, for example, the creation of Nazism out of “the cult of science and technology” and the desire to “restore an archaic, mythical world”; here, then, we see Federici's understanding of precisely the same dialectic of Enlightenment and myth, both in their worst forms, in Nazism (203). The inquisitors, the metonyms of capitalist accumulation, “conjur[ed] the devil” to centralize power and control the uncontrollable: already in the Hobbesian and Cartesian collusion exists the destructive mimesis that defined fascist appropriation (203). Magic and devil worship, once the antithesis of the capitalist ethic, are made instrumental under the pressure of Adornian “repressive equality,” the repressive subsumption and sublimation that makes the most radical the most oppressive: the devil, Federici writes, now works in the service of God—the God of capital, he who “brought order into the world” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997: 13; Federici, 2004: 203).

Federici's predominate mimesis-as-instrumentality undoubtedly overlaps with Adorno's understanding of fascist mimesis; how, though, must we understand Federici and Aesthetic Theory? Here, Federici is not Adornian, and—perhaps most of all—not psychoanalytic: the lack of a dialectic in mimesis is indeed a betrayal of the central dialectic of accumulation. The mimesis of the use of the devil is, for Federici, only instrumental: when the task of control was completed, “witch trials came to an end,” and, with it, the fascist mimesis that is imitation-toward-domination (Federici, 2004: 204). Federici writes much earlier that, given the success of all the aforementioned processes, “the revival of magic beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat,” a threat that would, if manifested, call the broader (ir)rationality into question (143). Once the social order was consolidated via the violence of primitive accumulation, Federici says, “recourse to the supernatural” in the manner of fascist mimesis was rendered unnecessary; most shockingly, “the practice of magic could even be allowed to continue” because of its vacuousness as a revolutionary vessel (205). On this, Federici could not be more opposed to Adorno. Adorno's point, like the double helix of violence and compulsion identified earlier in Marx, is precisely the omnipresence and perpetuity of the dialectic between Enlightenment and mythology: the central line of Dialectic—“myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology”—establishes the central dialectical interrelation that Federici indeed seemed to recognize in her Hegelianism (contra Marx), in her dialecticization of Foucault's relation of the self and Other, and in the figure of Caliban contained in the title of the book (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997: xvi). The central line of The Tempest, which Federici quotes as Prospero confessing that “this thing of darkness is mine,” requires a dialectical reading of Prospero's recognition of himself in Caliban, the absolute Other (Federici, 2004: 134). In the rejection of this central dialectic, then, Federici reverts to the same point from which her exposition on primitive accumulation ostensibly departs: if her central task is indeed to show the perpetuity of primitive accumulation, then she cannot simultaneously maintain the absolute victory of, for example, enlightenment over mythology such that mythology is fully and entirely pacified. The thesis of perpetuity rests upon the inevitable failure of the mute compulsion that ostensibly comes to dominate upon the success of its predecessor: in Federici's theorization, this classic Marxist transition misses the failure of mute compulsion to render passive the population conquered via violence. One might expect, then, that Federici's Marxism should align her fully with Adorno's thesis on the perpetuity of myth's manifestation, even in inverted form. What, then, goes wrong?

The sentence that most displays her distance from Adorno is coincidentally also the passage that advises our argumentative progression: the “‘going back’ [that] was a means of stepping forward” requires, like the form of Marx's Capital, a re-understanding of Federici based on her final statements (Federici, 2004: 203). The crucial difference that caused the divergence between Adorno and Federici is, we can say, on the question of the unconscious. For Adorno, influenced heavily by Freud and nascent Freudo-Marxism, the fetish character of the commodity—the seeming autonomy of commodities arising from their “peculiar social character” of production—can be read as a form of Marx's mute compulsion in its autonomic (re)production of the same: it is, though, a compulsion condemned to the recapitulation of what it repressed, just as the repressed object always returns (Adorno, 2020: 131; Freud, 2003: 155; Marx, 1976: 165). Adorno's explication of the deformed return of myth in the domineering of fascist mimesis is precisely what Lacan means when he says, drawing on Freud's theory of repression, that “the sender … receives from the receiver his own message in inverted form”; anti-Semitism, the “morbid expression of repressed mimesis,” is also an anti-mimetic false projection that “defines the most intimate experiences as hostile” such that the anti-Semite receives from the Jew himself in hostile form (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997: 187; Lacan, 2006a: 30). Federici's account of mute compulsion, though, has to remain entirely conscious and thus devoid of a psychoanalytic understanding; it is, as we saw, only mimesis-as-instrumentality. Her definition of magic as “an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work” privileges already instrumentality even in its original wielders (indeed, a wielder of an instrument), meaning its fascistic mimesis would not distort it in rendering it only instrumental (Federici, 2004: 142). Still, that fascistic mimesis was itself only instrumental for Federici, as evidenced by the ease of merely dropping the use of the devil and the belief in the supernatural after its value expired (204). Federici's use of the double helix is, in this sense, a diminished use: because the unconscious contains an autonomy that allows irregular eruptions through conscious normality, the compulsion of secondarily forming economic relations are, in fact, conscious processes of normality since it is violence which erupts consciously to maintain their regularity. The inability to map the structure of the two relations onto one another reveals precisely Federici's problem: her conception must always rely on the conscious intentions of all relevant actors, including the conscious revolts of the oppressed, the conscious iteration of economic relations, and the conscious violent suppression of resistance. Magic in its modern, desublimated forms, the primary example of her departure from Adorno, has for Federici no connection to the unconscious as what would perpetually continue to fracture the ideological veil of capitalist rationality; even if it could reconcile the Cartesian divide, the body for Federici points to nothing more than its physicality or even sexuality. The radicality of the Other is, for Federici, its capacity to fracture the Same: magic's inability to fracture, then, indicates its non-relation to the unconscious-as-Other.

What Federici's account of accumulation lacks, then, is a theory of retroactivity that would account for the ability to understand the double helix's instantiation in capital; we must add, then, “mimetic” to “accumulation” to take into account Federici's insights while properly understanding the perpetual resurfacing of accumulation's most oppressive aspects. For Adorno, the shudder—as being the result of mimesis and what brings mimesis about—is the retroactive moment at which processes and histories are unveiled in all their vulgarity and/or beauty. Already in Negative Dialectics, non-identity is both that which allows retroactive reflection toward mimesis (via its perpetual eruption from identity) and which is clarified in retrospection, a fact of non-identity that only exists via the existence of mimesis as what we might call processual non-identity (Adorno, 1973: 287). Only in the “shudder of the new” as that which “wants nonidentity,” Adorno says, “does mimesis unite with rationality without regression”; indeed, this shudder in its unity with the rationality of logic allows it to appear retroactively “as if it must be as it is and could not be otherwise” (Adorno, 1997: 20, 23, 136). The “moment of being shaken” in the shudder, writes Adorno, the moment where, in mimesis, the viewers “forget themselves and disappear into the work,” is the “possibility of truth” of the non-identical (244). It is this shudder wherein resides the possibility of “catch[ing] even the slightest glimpse beyond the prison,” of “speak[ing] truth about untruth” in the world of the alienated; for precisely this reason does the shudder define subjectivity as such: “life in the subject is nothing but what shudders” (245, 331). Indeed, the shudder as a response to the “fear of the overwhelming” is precisely the reaction of the witches upon the hammer of capital's violence swinging down: in this shudder, then, the mimesis that it itself is—as the manifestation of perpetual violence—and the retroactive understanding of this iteration occurs for the subject that is itself this shudder (245). The “utmost tension” with the solitary “I” in the point of the shudder indicates the force of the witch's subversion for all the reasons outlined by Federici: the foundational departure from her, though, is what this shudder reveals (245).

With Adorno, combining the insights already gained from Federici's exposition on Marx and Foucault, we must conclude that this shudder of the violence of reiterated primitive accumulation shows the process of mimetic accumulation, the real process constantly at play in the world of capital. What the reader expects “will have been” obvious conclusions at the end of Federici's trajectory is precisely the theory of mimetic accumulation that Adorno's contrast surfaces: a form of mimesis that constantly reverts to—or at least desublimates—its most violent/mythological tendencies while constantly accumulating difference in the body (of the proletariat) in its employment and repercussions (Lacan, 2006b: 684). As seen with Marx and Foucault, this form of accumulation functions primarily to produce the bodies and masses necessary for its own reproduction: it expropriates land, the womb, the life of the household, and every conceivable form of dead labor which can be transitioned to value in living labor. Via perpetual alienation, the alien Other is perpetually conquered in accordance with the will of capital's compulsion where production is always-already reproduction. Differences are accumulated while exploited, and in that accumulation constantly reverting to (or reproducing) the initial act of primitive accumulation. If the proletariat was, as Federici says, “the great Caliban of the time,” then two additions are in order (2004: 154). Firstly, the conclusion of mimetic accumulation is the reverse: it is, instead, the great Prospero of the time—the creator of production, the conqueror of the alien, and archetypal mime. More importantly, though, an understanding of the mimetic accumulation's perpetuity necessitates a rewriting of Federici's basic thesis: it is not that the proletariat was the great Caliban of a time past, but that it is the great Caliban of our time.

It is only with the dialectic lying coiled at the heart of mimetic accumulation, like a worm, that a view of liberation is possible—that, as Adorno and Horkheimer write, “the sight of the burning tree inspires a vision of the majesty of the day which lights the world without setting fire to it at the same time” (1997: 219). For Adorno, only if Enlightenment itself could “break the bounds of Enlightenment” would a non-instrumental rationality exist without mimetic self-destruction (208). Adorno, despite his frequent associations with political pessimism, does, in the spirit of Ernst Bloch, occasionally comment on utopia: a utopia, indeed, that is the harbor of the non-identical (Adorno, 1973: 281). As he says in Aesthetic Theory, a “utopia” that might exist outside Enlightenment instrumental rationality is always intrinsically retroactive: it is, he writes, a “recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it,” the redemptive side of mimesis against its capacity for subsumption (Adorno, 1997: 135). Though Federici writes that revolts against the “dialectics of accumulation” have, like capital, “achieved a global dimension,” the totalization of ideology, compulsion, and violence exposed in her final chapter—a chapter she ends in the disheartening note of the witch trials as “phenomena that are very close to home”—suggests the possibility of that global resistance's futility (Federici, 2004: 17, 239). The efficacy of violence's suppressions of the eruptions of compulsion's ubiquity does not reflect the dialectic that Federici herself describes as operative; without a point of retroactivity or a dialectic of the shudder of a reversion to violence, the witch hunts are consigned to perpetuity. With Adorno, though, the dialectic of mimetic accumulation, despite its fascist instrumentalization, possesses liberating reclamation with the intractability of the non-identical as its internal opposition; as Caliban cries: “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (Shakespeare, 2009: 26–27).

Conclusion

Baudelaire's famous line, notably quoted by Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects, describes exactly the relation of capital to violence expected by a theory of mimetic accumulation, summarized again, like Caliban's first epigraph, in just a sentence: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Federici's primary project was to unveil the ideological veil obscuring the perpetuity of this violence, and at this—especially in the unique dialogue she creates with and between Marx and Foucault—she undoubtedly succeeded. How the reader is to understand the final pages of Caliban, though, is a question that, as we saw, necessitates exogenous comparison. A theory worthy of the challenge of capital's origin, the great problem it confronts, must respect the dialectic's centrality in all its permeations, especially in mimesis. Indeed, though, the passage through Federici and her interlocuters is much like the sublative movement in Phenomenology of Spirit or Science of Logic, and it is in the conclusion of that movement where we find both the radical kernel and the missing link to be added retroactively. Via Federici we enter the project, via Marx we add capital, via Foucault the body, and via Adorno mimesis; as long as accumulation remains the noun predominating the term, its synecdochic referent requires the application of Ariel's famous statement in The Tempest to our time: “Hell is empty / And all the devils are here!” (Shakespeare, 2009: 21).