Logical circuitry—perverse circuitry

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt is an experiment on circuitry. Its objects— the economic forms, the “liberal political architecture,” and the representational tools that generate and naturalize racial differences—compose “logic circuitry” whose outcomess are frequently “perverse” (48, 13–14). Ferreira da Silva aims to “crack” this circuitry, to “expose, to crack open the racial dialectic” through a “one-off experiment with a tool and a procedure” (13–14). She finds a precedent for this endeavor in Hortense Spillers, whose “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” “short-circuits” (33) Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous depiction of the black family as a “tangle of pathology” (1965: 27).

What does this circuitry do? ‘Circuit’ can describe any route that passes through a series of fixed points. But circuitry connotes a certain arrangement of hardware, a network of components through which electricity flows and is attenuated for specific ends. In the age of electronic digital computing, such networks, sometimes called switching or logic circuits, model this or that aspect of the world and automatically perform certain operations on that which they model. In this way, logic circuitry makes the symbolic (abstract) operative in and on the real. In electrical engineering, a short circuit describes a path with no or low impedance that allows a current to bypass some or all of a circuit’s components. Put differently, a short circuit is what allows a current to deviate from the (symbolically) designed form a given circuit materializes in hardware. In what follows, I argue that Ferreira da Silva's presentation of the economic-juridical-ethical architecture of race as a kind of “circuitry”—which can be too easily dismissed as a passing metaphor—illuminates much of what is most significant about Unpayable Debt. More specifically, I want to suggest that the logic circuit's entanglement of abstract and concrete, or symbolic and real, offers a compelling image of capital and race as co-constitutive elements of an emergent social form.

The Moynihan-type circuit exemplifies the conceptual architecture with which Ferreira da Silva is here concerned. This circuit permits a degree of historicism. Indeed, Moynihan’s 1965 report identified the “unimaginable mistreatment” extending from chattel slavery as central to contemporary inequalities. What this conceptual architecture cannot accommodate is the possibility that slavery generated and continues to modulate the categories—racial blackness, but also, importantly, its putative opposite—from which the entire liberal discourse of race and racialized inequalities is composed. This is why Ferreira da Silva can present Spillers' critique, which traced these habits of thought to chattel slavery's intricate network of valuation, abjection, and (un)gendering, as short circuiting Moynihan's text. Moynihan’s circuit was one in which racialized and gendered-sexuated positions could be rendered by switching components, rendered as a fixed number of discrete alternatives from which a certain combination (+black, +female, -male) assuredly produced a pathological output. Through this circuitry, the latter came to appear the mechanical outcome of a family composition that diverged from those “stable, effective units, living according to patterns of American society in general” that represent the equilibrium state in Moynihan's diagram of the postabolition United States (Moynihan, 1965: 29).

Although Moynihan made no reference to the technologies of demography, his account reproduced in social-scientific terms Hollerith’s 1889 ‘Diagram for Combination Counting’ (Figure 1), through which the founder of what would some years later become IBM succinctly demonstrated how an electrical circuit could process census data rendered on punch cards, which is to say, as a series of discrete alternatives. “If…it is desired to know the number of native white males, of native white females, of foreign white males, of foreign white females, of colored males, and of colored females,” Hollerith wrote,

ordinary relays are arranged as shown in the diagram…the magnets of which are connected with the press as indicated. If a card punched for native white, and male is placed in the press, the corresponding relays are actuated, which close a secondary circuit through the counter magnet, native white male, thus registering one on the corresponding counter (1889: 253).

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Figure 1.

Diagram for combination counting. Source: Herman Hollerith, “an electrical tabulating machine,” The Quarterly, Columbia University School of Mines 10:16, 1889.

This circuit for automatically combining multiple inputs into a single output reveals something fundamental about the switching logic involved in rendering race, sex, and gender as discrete, combinable outcomes of biology and/or culture. In Moynihan’s deployment, the same switching logic functions at the level of common sense, mechanically positing—without recourse to any actual machinery—certain arrangements as automatically pathological. This is indeed a “logical circuitry” that is in its operations “perverse.” It generates a chaotic or formless output, a “tangle of pathology,” through an imaginative procedure that appears exemplarily formal. In Ferreira da Silva’s terms, Spillers (1987) short-circuited Moynihan's report by showing how categories he treated as abstract givens were in fact materially constituted—rendered as forms that connote formlessness—by the same logical procedure though which he sought to represent and in so doing resolve their putative disorder. One way of reading Unpayable Debt is as an expanded diagram of that procedure and those forms.

Hollerith’s circuit diagram and Moynihan’s report are exemplary outcomes of modern racialization. Both deploy the same logical and narrative forms, but neither captures the historical dynamics that generate those forms. Indeed, both obscure those dynamics as a basic condition of their functionality. Those dynamics encompass the abstract-concrete relations of capital accumulation, the affordances of law, and the multiple modes of representation that generate racial knowledge as a body of data about naturally occurring differences with mechanically predictable outcomes. What kind of circuitry can capture those workings? This is one of the questions at the centre of Unpayable Debt, and it is also the book's most intractable problem. To approach the question, it is necessary to first identify a common language or concept space. Yet, as Ferreira da Silva observes, that necessity imposes a presumption of unity (178). If one wants to avoid positioning “racial and cultural difference” as “extraneous to modern liberal-capitalist polity,” one must find some common element that makes it possible to integrate “the Racial and Capital.” Yet the racial and capital each refer, in Ferreira da Silva's argument, “to a different kind of unity or multiplicity—qualitative or quantitative, respectively” (178, emphasis added). For many Marxist analyses of capital, the unifying element is value, the real abstraction generated by labor performed under the historically specific conditions of capitalist production and circulation. Unity is thus premised on formally ‘free' or self-possessed persons who enter into a contractual relation to sell their labor power in increments, in exchange for a wage—a relation that, when it becomes sufficiently widespread, creates the impression of form of society that runs by itself, a “self-equilibrating and self-sustaining system” (Hall, 1973: 25) of buyers and sellers, patterned by the circulation of value and oriented toward the expanded reproduction of capital. However, rendering the capitalist form of society as a linear circuit of 'free' labor and value introduces a problem of causality when it comes to the generation, imposition, and modulation of racialized “qualitative” categories such as freedom and humanity.

Ferreira da Silva outlines the problem as follows: “interpretive versions of historical materialism retain the Category of Labor as the determinative tool, which assures unity to the concept of capital, without considering how its elevation to this role as a scientific tool could be related to the extra-scientific aspects, such as the juridical and ethical ones” (170). In other words, the economic (value, generated by labor) too often overwrites the juridical (freedom, exemplified in the contract) and the ethical (the attribution or withholding of human status). Because the latter two are inseparable from the logic and history of modern racialization, this overwriting renders impossible “interpretive historical-materialist attempts to address racial subjugation.” It leads to “the writing of the Racial (and its referents) as anterior and/or exterior to the conditions of existence encompassed by Capital” (170). This impossibility is crystallized in the problems of primitive accumulation, colonialism, and, exemplarily, slavery:

The Slave, insofar as she is a Human being, is not like any other property, that is, she is a commercial thing but neither natural not artificial. Everything else, every other existing thing, would fall under the natural or the artificial, and therefore would not be contemplated by the principles of Humanity, namely liberty and equality. For it is precisely this ambiguity, her being a Human that figures fungibility instead of dignity, that makes the possibility thinkable that then/there, as here/now, there was no question that, like the horses, the soil, the rainwater, and the sunrays, the body of the Slave, as well as her mind, transduced into cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, or any other commodity that her labor brought into existence. (24)

This presentation of commodity-producing labor as transduction—as a process of transmission in which the transmitted thing changes form—underscores the problem of causality that theories of capital centered on a general figure of ‘free' human labor as the source of value entail. Are plantation slaves regarded as unproductive (from the perspective of such theories) because they were (legally) unfree and (ethically) posited as nonhuman? Since freedom and humanity are historically specific and foundationally racialized ascriptions, to answer these questions in the affirmative is to place the racial, rather than value, at the heart of capital. The racialized assignation of ‘free' human status must precede the economic procedure of value production. Yet, to make this explicit is to unsettle the primacy of the economic in the analysis of capital, and thus (in Ferreira da Silva’s account) the entire project of Marxian analysis. “Historical materialism,” Ferreira da Silva writes, “cannot remain intact after a confrontation with the racial” (212).

Of “central importance,” then, “is how the juridical form of a contract (a referent of liberty) provides the organizing principle for describing properly capitalist ‘social conditions’” (188). If “human labor alone is productive (value creating),” and “if a slave is a human being,” Ferreira da Silva asks, “why is it that her labor is not productive?” (208). As she elaborates this problem—the problem of unity, as illuminated by the relations (and non-relations) among value, ‘free’ labor, and slavery—Ferreira da Silva insists that she is “not interested in challenging, correcting, or improving” Marx’s account of capitalist social form, but rather wants to “de/recompose it in order to expose the various components that enter into the assembling of capital” (227). Through this de/recomposition, she identifies as an effect of Marxist theory a linear circuit of ‘free’ humans and their value-bearing products that renders the allocation, withholding, and attenuation of ‘free’ human status unthinkable, and offers in its place an “image of existence that does not presume linearity and the onto-epistemological infrastructures and political architecture it supports” (189).

Unpayable Debt offers “a reading strategy” that can locate the properly nonlinear relationships among “three registers of deployment of the conceptum of labor—the economic, the ethical, and the juridical—that gathers capital in Marx’s original conception” (191). That reading strategy centers on Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, in which Dana, a ‘free’ black woman in 1976 Los Angeles, time-travels to antebellum Maryland. Dana, exemplifying the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation (15 and passim), superimposes two incommensurable structural positions, each a specific concentration of economic, juridical, and ethical determinations in a determinate historical moment: in 1976, value-producing, free, human; in 1815, non-value-producing, unfree, nonhuman. This superimposition foregrounds problems of nonlinear causation that are often swept aside in theories of capital that, implicitly or explicitly, elevate a certain figure of labor and disregard racialization as secondary to the inner laws of capital accumulation.

“The source of much of the difficulty in addressing racial subjection,” Ferreira da Silva writes, “resides in precisely how Marx assembled the concept of capital under the nineteenth-century episteme” (170). Is the difficulty in specifying the relationship between slavery and value the product of theory, or of the structure and the relations to which that theory pertains? The figure of the circuit to which Ferreira da Silva returns offers a way of situating theory in relation to structure, so that the former can be seen to arise from, modulate, and symptomatically figure the latter. In Ferreira da Silva’s analysis, labor is at once the transfer and the transformation of the body/mind of an individual producer: the transduction of body/mind into commodities. From this perspective, it does indeed appear nonsensical that only ‘free’ human labor creates new value, while slave labor (like the activity of nonhuman animals and machines) does not. In so far as both forms of labor change the matter and/or energy composition of the materials on which they are put to work, both should be “transduced into” their products: cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, tables, chairs, automobiles, haircuts, services, and, yes, circuits, amongst many other commodities (258–259). But this linear circuit of transfer and transduction is closer to the image of capital produced by those Marx read and critiqued, most obviously David Ricardo. Marx reproduced parts of that image, to be sure. But his intervention was to show how value is specifically not a transmitted substance emitting directly from individual laborers, the particular bodies/minds expended in a given moment of production. The inner logic of capital is less a sequence of linear connections from bodies/minds to products than an expandable circuit whose most compressed form can be written M-C-M’, but whose real operations entail a distributed network of abstractions and concrete connections. In this circuit, money (value’s principal form of appearance) mediates the acquisition of the commodities and labor to be deployed in the production process and the sale of the products that emerge from that process (Marx, 1978: 109–199). “The two inverted phases of the movement which makes up the metamorphosis of a commodity,” Marx (1976: 207) wrote, “constitute a circuit: commodity-form, stripping off of this form, and return to it.” And that circuit only works—to generate surplus value, and to maintain a determinate form of society oriented towards that generation—when it happens over and over again, in parallel with many other such processes, supported by extraeconomic operations that shape and are shaped by the exigencies of accumulation. The expanded form of capital’s general circuit is not linear but distributed and recursive.

The ‘substance’ of this circuit is not matter or energy. It cannot be analogized to the DC electricity that animated the switching operations of Hollerith’s counting machine. It is a materially-produced and materially-consequential virtuality, a social average that is generated in and then ‘transmitted’ back onto the value and the value-productivity of labor from the total network of value-mediated relations. Value is in this sense informatic; it is not matter or energy, but a pattern that emerges from and comes to shape arrangements of matter and/or energy (Franklin, 2021). Others have described it as spectral (Arthur, 2001). Quanta of this social average—or socially necessary labor time (SNLT)—are the elementary units of value, and when the relations that generate them are sufficiently generalized those quanta also become the general unit of valuation—including of things that were not produced through ‘free’ labor. This is made possible by the relative independence of value, price, and profit: an individual commodity has a determinate value composition comprising the values of the raw materials, fractions of machinery, and labor that went into its production; but value must be realized in exchange, and because prices shift dynamically at the system level, a given commodity can be sold at a price higher, lower, above, or equal to its value. For example: “a manufacturer who makes use of a new discovery before this has become general,” Marx wrote (1991: 345), “sells more cheaply than his competitors and yet still sells above the individual value of his commodity, valorizing the specifically higher productivity of the labour he employs as surplus labour. He thus realizes a surplus profit.” Since value cannot be added in exchange, if the sale price of a given commodity is higher than its value composition (including the surplus value created in production) the additional value must come at the expense of some unfortunate capitalist elsewhere. Value is in this sense an emergent distribution amongst all extant labor, commodities, and money in the total circuit of capital, not a fixed property of objects whose price (realizable value) is set by the labor process from which they emerged. Circulation “becomes the great retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune to this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it, let alone the more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum [sacrosanct things, beyond the commerce of men]” (Marx, 1976: 229). This distribution ensures the entanglement of each moment of production in the total network, an entanglement whose global and thus (implicitly) racializing dynamics Tomich (1990) emphasized in Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar.

It is not, then, that nothing but the direct product of ‘free’ labor is subject to valuation, or can be sold at a profit. Many things are drawn into the circuit of value-mediated relations, where they are and can. ¹ Conseqently, the condition of value-productivity cannot be grounded in the status borne by an individual instance of labor power—(juridical) freedom, (ethical) humanity, and so on. That condition must be grounded in the placement of a given source of labor in the network of productive and circulatory relations. Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that the attribution of juridical and ethical properties, the psychic operations of state and subject, are parts of that same network and exist in co-constitutive rather than foundational relationships with the production of value. The value ‘transmitted' by slave labor, like that ‘transmitted' from materials and machinery and unlike that ‘transmitted' by ‘free’ labor, has already been accounted for in the slave’s price. The acquisition of the value allocated to the slave (at the point of purchase; anticipated surplus value informed by SNLT) occurs in a single transaction, not the many that animate the loop of wage-mediated labor. This is why, in Marx’s (1991: 945) words, “The price paid for a slave is nothing but the anticipated and capitalized surplus-value or profit to be wrung out of the slave.” The difference between ‘free’ and slave labor emerges from the relation through which each is bought and sold. Only ‘free’ labor can add new value to the circuit, but this is not because of some ethical or juridical property ascribed to the bearer of that labor. It is because only ‘free’ labor is recursively subject to the process of money-mediated exchange, which makes possible and obscures a variable ratio of value returned to wages against value advanced to the commodity. Indeed, it is the absence of this ratio—and thus the impossibility of shifting it in favor of the surplus value through the deployment of techniques for reducing wages, sweating labor, and/or more tightly controlling the allocation of paid time—that in part explains the waning of chattel slavery and the persistence of racialized techniques of labor devaluation grounded in that institution. Capital “invested in the colonies” could yield higher rates of profit rate due to “the lower degree of development” and the “use of slaves and coolies, etc” (Marx, 1991: 345). This means that the linked structural and psychic dimensions of slavery, in particular the non-allocation or attenuated allocation of value, freedom, and humanity, are integral structural functions that cannot be consigned either to the prehistory or the outside of capital. Indeed, Braudel (1984: 26) reached for an electrical circuit analogy to describe one aspect of this dynamic: inequalities in the world economy, he wrote, function like “differences of voltage which make possible the functioning of the whole.”

Unpayable Debt shows that the “logic circuitry” wiring together value, freedom, and race is not linear (like Hollerith’s or Moynihan’s) but recursive. It introduces negative, excessive, and attenuated forms of status (‘free,’ human) to the operating logic that Marx (1993: 245) observed when he wrote that “the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom,” which as “pure ideas” are “merely the idealized expressions of this basis” and which “as developed in juridical, political, social relations” are “merely this basis to a higher power.” The exemplary manifestation of this nonlinear circuitry may be the existence—the dominance, even—of a putatively deracinated ‘freedom’ that carries with it racialized slavery as a psychic check against its manifest, value-grounded artificiality. The extant circuit diagrams that most closely correlate with this social circuitry may be those whose designers drew on the symbolic repertoire of electrical engineering to model self-modifying complex systems. Jay Wright Forrester’s diagrams of underemployment dynamics in urban systems (Figure 2) and Howard Odum’s energy circuit diagram for population-education-income relationships (Figure 3) exemplify this tendency. These circuits were intended to represent economic dynamics as distributed, recursive relations whose long-term outcomes cannot be predicted on the basis of purely linear causality, and they implicitly (Forrester) or explicitly (Odum) posit race, matter/energy, and money (form of appearance of value) as distinct but densely interconnected phenomena. In so doing, they faintly mark the nonlinear logics that generate and modulate racialized positions: what appear as linear products of biology and/or culture are in practice the shifting outcomes of recursive structural operations that generate, allocate, and operationalize positive (value-productive, ‘free,’ human) and negative (unproductive, unfree, nonhuman) ascriptions as conditions of the structure’s ongoing functionality. Disclose, that is, under the positively-signifying (albeit heavily attenuated) proxies of urban underemployment (Forrester) and “nonwhite population” (Odum). ² OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 3.

Causal diagrams for some population-education-income relationships. Source: Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power and Society (New York: Wiley, 1971).

The linear circuit, then, depicts nothing more than the mystified appearance of race in the liberal political architecture. For Ferreira da Silva, showing the real operations of racialization means marking the techniques of composition that analytically consign slave labor (along with dispossession) to the prehistory or the outside of capital. But the force of her intervention intensifies when it comes into dialogue with a concept of capital that is more properly capital’s own, and that is diagrammed, albeit in an admixture with remnants of a liberal account characterized by linearity, unity, and identity, in Marx. The latter functions not by the linear transfer and/or transduction of substance, but rather through a virtual register that extends beyond the direct products of ‘free’ human labor, and which interacts with juridical and ethical determinations through the same formal mechanisms—loops, structured exclusions, and conditional integrations—that obtain around the moment(s) of valuation. From this perspective, the superimposition of slavery and ‘free’ personhood via the time travel plot in Kindred—and thus in Ferreira da Silva’s (dis)organizing figure, the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation—violates by giving a fleeting narrative form to that which is not meant to appear: on one hand, the nonlinear operating principles of modernity’s “onto-epistemological infrastructures and political architecture”; and on the other, the structurally essential roles played by those consigned to states of nonhumanity, unfreedom, and “total violence” in the ongoing functionality of those infrastructures and that architecture.