Response

Without separability and the local spatiality that provides determinacy (and its objects) and the unfolding temporality that provides Subjectivity (and its world), the terms, tools, and formulations of the post-Enlightenment determinative and interpretive moments are of no use.

Let me begin by acknowledging my debt to Michaeline Crichlow and the eight scholars who took time from their many and more important tasks to read and write about Unpayable Debt. Their comments amass a provocative and diverse collection, from which I have learned a great deal. A most important lesson I gathered from reading these responses is precisely what led me to quote from the book—which is why I open this response with this specific sentence from the introduction to the last chapter of the book—a reminder that, in these social mediatized days, one must attend to how the written word a/effects readers.

Not only in this battleground one engages with both humans and the intelligent machines we have created. The scene is set up in such a shallow way that most forget that they are addressing another person or persons, that it all happens at the level of ideas (and, if you prefer, ideologies), that adjectivizing, dismissing, or de-authorizing gestures help to stay within the 280 words or less limit. So, if we are to make sense and address the violence and violations that support this electronically mediated existence of ours—in particular, those that ensure the extractive and expropriative mechanisms of production and circulation of the raw materials and the electronic gadgets that supports it, we need more than to engage in a battle of ideas and ideologies.

What is needed is a collaboration toward the assembling of a whole other analytical apparatus and political program. That is where Unpayable Debt seeks to intervene. It was composed to work in that moment, as it is part of the groundwork for designing the kind of shift in thinking needed for addressing what this global moment demands from us; one which includes the movement introduced by the sentence I quote above. Because of the centrality of thinking in the modern context, such a shift requires a treatment of the tools available for analyzing the political context, which need to begin with an excavation and a mapping of their conditions of emergence, production, and deployment. What I do in this response is to engage the readers in terms of how they responded to how the book strives to perform this double task.

In Unpayable Debt, the figure of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation is made to work in many ways toward assembling a philosophical intervention, both at the metaphysical and ontoepistemological level, ways which do not rehearse the Kantian program. The sentence quoted above, which is one of the simplest and shortest in the book, introduces precisely the outline of such a manner of intervention. It simply states that without space and time, which Kant calls pure intuitions—by “pure” he means they are given before experience, and as such operate metaphysically—the philosophic and scientific texts assembled in the 19^th century, the ones which have occupied the 20^th and remain very much cherished in this early 21^st century, would not be effective as ontoepistemological devices. Why? Here I add something missing in the sentence: because the determinative and interpretive tools they create only function under the presumption of linearity, which is given both temporally (in the image of a continuous line) and spatially (in the image of a surrounding line).

From Galileo, Bacon, through Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Foucault and Deleuze, modern thinking has occupied everything nonhuman (Nature) and human (World) with linearity. What has been accomplished over 400 years or so of reiterations of the separations and conjunctions it obtains even before thinking comes about? Linearity, imperceptibly, obtains that which will then be subjected to thought, evidence, fact, event, thing and object. Yes. The task Unpayable Debt takes upon is very difficult indeed. Among the many moves designed to deal with this difficulty, in particular, the book foregrounds the scene of subjugation instead of the scene of production. For “slave labor,” the social scientific and historic category that places the Slave in the scene of work (where she is forced to work, as use value to produce other use values, including other enslaved workers) but also where she is useful as a gauge for how the wage worker stands in respect to the capitalist, in regard to their presumed common liberty and equality. In the scene of production, that is, in the moment of use value consumption and the production of exchange value, the Slave works perfectly for Marx’s framework, including in the production of cotton, as use value to be transformed by living labor and in the generation of capital to be invested in proper capitalist production in the factories in England. In the scene of subjugation, which the wounds in her captive body cannot but recall, she highlights (as a beam of blacklight) a position, in which as a person she only has use value (as commodity herself), she recalls the trade chain, which begins with the crossing (the trade) from the African continent to the American continent. As possession, she recalls the legal concept of title; and, as a worker she reminds us that she is there because the lands were forcefully expropriated from their originary inhabitants. In doing so, in erasing the separation between juridic (a Negro, i.e., chattel), economic (a slave worker), and ethic (chattel [thing] and worker [person] simultaneously) moments of the post-Enlightenment political architecture, the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation throws blacklight onto the otherwise un-visible sutures made by linearity and its tools.

When she dismounts separability logically (the mode of operation of transcendental reason), temporally (and with that the supremacy of the historical as an ontoepistemological horizon), and spatially (the account of capital that renders it something that would and could only happen in Europe in the 19^th century), she also invites questions that may lead to considerations that might erase the distinction, the separation between wage labor and slave labor, as Gonzales suggests. That she does only up to a point because what title affords the slave owner is precisely that which the capitalist does not/cannot take for granted, which is the right to deploy total violence. That can be imaged as, on the one hand, the wage laborer bearer of contractual rights saying no to the capitalist, and demanding that the state intervenes, as the enforcer of laws and rights, against the capitalist’s excess; on the other hand, the owner-bearer of property rights considering how much force should be deployed in the punishing of a slave who refuses to work or obey, a consideration that is about whether or not the owner is willing to lose his working tool. That is the distinction the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation allows one to make when considering the slave is an adequate figure for the analysis of the workings of capital today. What she does is to demand that any program designed for dismantling state capital must take into account the juridical conditions characterized by the deployment of total violence (colonial domination, as Fanon has reminded us, and enslavement, as C. L. R James has described so powerfully). Actually, Gonzalez’s comments highlight the relevance of the juridic, which recalls precisely the role of the State in defending the interests of Capital when he quotes: “There is here,” Marx notes, “an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides” (1976: 344). Indeed. However, when the State did mediate the relation between slave owner and the enslaved person, such as in the Dred Scott decision in the United States, it obviously found in favor of the sole bearer of (property) rights among the two, who is also the only one whose liberty mandates protection.

Furthermore, what the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation also does, which is crucial to the proposition in Unpayable Debt, is allow me to think with “the colonies” and “slave labor” without having to return to the themes of subsumption and the sequence of modes of production, both of which recall separability, respectively, as it is demanded and rehearsed logically and historically. In fact, she allows me to consider racial subjugation without the frame of Hegel’s Lordship and Bondsman’s passage, as well as to describe the relationship between slave labor and living (wage, free) labor without comparing the two—which is something Marx does so much that one can indeed say that “slave labor” plays the leading rhetorical role in Capital. Instead, because she only appears in the equation of value (as presented in chapter seven, volume one of Capital) as/in cotton, because the conditions under which she works do not figure in the account of the production of surplus value, she allows me to treat slavery as part of the moment of capital, as a constitutive element of its equation, and not as a support, something on which it is erected or stands or to which it compares (in a metaphor). By violating linearity, as it obtains separability, logically and empirically (spatially and temporally, i.e.), the captive body in the scene of subjugation allows me to move beyond the pair linear time and cyclical time, as I understand is Austin’s critique of the engagement with historical materialism. Instead of a critique of a particular rendering of time, as my guiding quote suggests, the move is towards gathering descriptors for existence that do not presume linearity—and, with it, temporality and spatiality as pre-conditions for thinking. Instead, that sentence introduces speculations guided by an image of existence inspired by infinity, that is, which do not hold anything bound to itself (straight line) or with something else (surrounding line). Because it does presume an I or we (first-person singular or plural) or even an (as in one) it (as Nature, Other, or Object), the image here is not of separate things that kinetically connect, but one that foregrounds how everything and anything is a singular re/de/composition of these elementa, infinitely. Precisely that image, which obtains implicancy and indeterminacy as descriptors for existence, sustains the political goal of decolonization (which here include something like reparations) conceived as the return of total value expropriated from the Slave’s body and the Native’s land under the threat of lethal (total) violence, such as rape and death. The question, “How can this argument be of interest to those interested in the study of the neoliberal worker?” has to do with how one positions the neoliberal worker in regard to the operations of colonial and racial subjugation in the current global context and how it can guide the study of capitalist production outside the European and North American space. Hence, I ask instead, how does it guide our thinking of the miners in the DRC, Chile; the essential workers during the apogee of the COVID-19 pandemic, the farm workers in California and British Columbia, among others?

From the moment I decided to expand the essay, also titled Unpayable Debt, published in the Documenta 17 Reader in 2017 into a book I frequently found myself wondering whether I should write two books or only one. That question which is as much about form as it is about content was only settled in words on the pages when I realized that if the book did not collapse the distinction between form and content it tracks—as it considers the ontoepistemological intrastructure of contemporary thinking—it would be of no use. Another way of stating the problem is to transform the quoted sentence into a question: How can we say anything that can be understood without using terms, tools, and formulations, other than the ones designed in the post-Enlightenment determinative and interpretive moments, that is, terms that do not presuppose separability and the local spatiality that provides determinacy (and its objects) and the unfolding temporality that provides Subjectivity (and its world)? One way of describing Unpayable Debt, the monograph, is that it is a presentation of that how. This is something made possible only because it is one, instead of two books. It is a presentation of the confrontational movement, which I call negativation, of exposing (describing and tracking the effects) the ontoespistemological infrastructure of modern thinking. It is an (one-off) experiment in that negativation can never be presented in the same way. Every instance of its deployment will be singular depending on what is submitted to it, what is exposed, and to what effect. It is at the same time a proposition of another point of departure for thinking, which I call infinity, which is inspired not by another way of knowing but by thinking at the very limits of the prevailing mode of knowing, the one which is predicated on violence. It is all of that because it is a re/de/composition of the post-Enlightenment episteme, in which each of its moments and ontoepistemological tools are made to work for the framing of decolonization as the only political goal, that is, as the end of a program for dismantling the modern structures of power and addressing its lethal effects.

For the most part, academic readers, well-trained as we are as post-Enlightenment thinking things, enjoy the comfort of such pairs — like determinative versus interpretive, materialist versus idealist, Europe versus everybody else, free versus slave, linear versus cyclical time, etc.—because they very quickly and economically do the work of linearity and its intrastructure. For instance, when Gabara describes the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation as a magnet and a lever, I cannot help but take it as a description of how the mode of intervention, of which Unpayable Debt is the singular experiment, interpolates the reader as such post-Enlightenment subject. By that I mean that it disturbs attempts at settling the book in the determinative or interpretive orientation, for instance. Such disturbance needs to be resolved, which is something Gabara does by saying that it is an artist book, a Brazilian artist book. Unpayable Debt was, as it turns out, published by a press that is known by its artist books, but it is not one of these, nor is it an artist’s book. Or rather, it is an artist book in so far as it is a book by an academic who is also an artist, but as such it is also an academic book. More significantly, it is both and neither precisely because the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation does not let it be either: it comes out of a science fiction text to guide the tracking of the effects of an anthropological and sociological category, which it does by returning to its historical antecedent. As I have said before, she does a job like the one I make equations perform in other texts, which is to cause disturbances in the signifying surface by making existing, conventional thinking tools process ideas they are never not asked to do but for which they are definitely the best suited for doing so.

Talking about such thinking tools, one such construct, the ‘racial dialectic,’ served very well as an attempt at fitting Unpayable Debt into one of such dichotomies. Here I am talking about Franklin’s distinction between logical (linear) circuits and recursive circuits. Perhaps because Franklin has not attended to the fact that my reading of Marx’s original presentation is not another version of the racial dialectic, but an engagement with the ontoepistemological intrastructure that renders the text of historical materialism, it was not a difficult move. It consists basically in a distinction, through which he reads Unpayable Debt’s argument regarding the role and meaning of value in “Marxist analyses of capital.” That distinction allows for the activation of the significant one between linear and recursive circuits, which then is used to cancel (by calling it mistaken) my reading of Marx’s original presentation of historical materialism.

In this gesture, I find an expected response to the question with which I open this section, which is how to be comprehended without the intrastructures of linearity, which is that there is no without. Linearity will get you, in the form of the X or the / (the trace), as without it, it seems impossible to say anything about anything. Usually, this maneuver takes the form of a combination of reductions, which help to set up oppositions. In Franklyn’s case, it occurs through making my distinction between determinative and interpretive to work with the one between linear and recursive circuits, which organizes the commentary. To do so, Franklin first does not consider the treatment of the Racial as a political-symbolic tool but instead reads it sociologically (as in reference to “racial ascriptions” and “racialization”), as if the core argument is about inclusion, now posited in terms of a distinction between human and nonhuman. Following is a deployment of a linear (logic) circuit, which reduces my argument to (1) being about how one moment of the post-Enlightenment political architecture overwrites the other, which (2) renders it impossible for the interpretive to account for the Racial, which leads to (3) rendering the Racial exterior/anterior. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this reading. It makes perfect sense. The only issue is that it is not the point of the proposition in chapter three. For the focus there is on how, in fact, Marx does take both the juridic and the ethic moments into account in his analysis of capital, and that it is precisely in that account that the referents of the Racial are left out of the building of the concept of Capital. Another productive conflation, or generative simplification, comes in the form of a collapsing of two different statements: first, if I accept Marx’s account of labor as the sole productive element along with the thesis of productivity, etc., then… (which organizes my reading of Marx’s original presentation in chapter three); and second, that the proposition of labor is not a production but as transduction, which basically also means one for which the notion of value is irrelevant (which is the whole point of the speculations in chapter four). But Franklin ignores that these are distinct takes on labor, when reducing the work done in both chapters and attributing to me the view of labor as “at once the transfer and the transformation of the body/mind of an individual producer: the transduction of body/mind into commodities.” From that follows the conclusion that I treat value as substance, which I think is due to how the move to materiality—in which along with the distinction between ethic and the economic, the very idea of value loses significance—is lost in the reductions that make Franklin’s argument possible. This overall gesture, of course, allows for the repositioning of the argument of Unpayable Debt in a familiar ontoespitemological place: “In Marx, value is specifically not a transmitted substance emitting directly from the laborer, the body/mind 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.” A move that, by reducing the argument in the book to an egregious misunderstanding of Marx puts everything else in it into question, without having to take the whole proposition into account, and leaves the post-Enlightenment thinking thing comfortable in familiar environs, enjoying a well-deserved Gotcha!

When I was the political secretary of the Communist Party of Brazil cell in the housing project where I grew up in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, something that bothered me the most, after its Stalinist-Maoist orientation, was the idea that all we (the low working class black teenager members of the cell) needed was a correct interpretation of that historical situation in order to do what was needed to accelerate the bourgeois revolution, which would lead to the creation of the proper conditions for the proletarian revolution. That as the political secretary I was tasked with preparing everyone else to deploy and spread such an analysis in the ideological battlefield is a gift for which I am forever thankful. I cherish it because it convinced me that as much as Marxism was the only proper critique of capital it was also in need for serious adjustments if it were to ably address the global-historical circumstances under which we are doing our militant work. Forty years later, I wonder if we are not in need of adding to our political organizing something akin to that kind of preparation for the ideological battlefield. I say that for two reasons. First, because that preparation included paying close attention to what was said, learning how to identify the root and other aspects of thinking that characterized the difference tendencies (Trotskyites, reformists, social democrats), and learning how to unravel an argument by exposing its roots and not by simplifying, reducing, and adjectivizing it. Now one of the reasons why the work as a political secretary eventually made me leave the Communist Party of Brazil while remaining (yes, to this day, fundamentally a Marxist!!) is the fact that its ideological stance was unyielding. My thinking is not oriented towards judging what others say on the basis of what I take to be true, but towards excavating the very conditions of possibility for establishing that the quest is for truth and for how to identify it. That makes me not good at the pedagogical orientation that is key to post-Enlightenment thinking.

Precisely that orientation I find in the two comments I address in this section, which manifest in the telling me what I got wrong in Marx and how I missed that he had already done what I say he doesn’t. Though, as a post-Enlightenment thinking thing, I do understand the option for taking the opportunity to teach me, instead of doing the crucial work of preparing and unleashing an ideological blow—or even, more conventionally, as Franklin does, to attempt at an analytical resituating of the argument so as to set it up for correction—it makes it difficult to give a response that does not return the same pedagogical gestures, that is, adjectivizing or dismissing or correcting.

If I am to say anything that makes sense, then, it is in the spirit of the ideological battle of yesteryears, but in the manner of Unpayable Debt, not of an expanded Twitter feed. That is, I respond to the form of presentation of their criticism more than to the content of De Genova’s and Best’s common argument, which is about Marx having already done what I said he doesn’t do. First, both—De Genova with references to mastery and pedestal, and that unfreedom affected all labor and Best’s arguing that slavery was the condition of the emergence of capital—are correct in pointing out that and describing how Marx talks about slavery and the colony. My point is precisely that Marx’s account of capital uses at least two kinds of statements, determinative and delimitative ones. And my argument regarding slavery and “the colonies” is that they are not contemplated in the determinative statements, such as the theory of value as presented in chapter seven, volume 1. Second, the Racial, in my usage, refers to a political-symbolic tool, the assembling of which I map in Toward a Global Idea of Race, one which is quite distinct from the formulation of the notion of race I find in Best’s and De Genova’s comments (the one referring to exclusion, hierarchy, divisions, etc.). Here is a quote from De Genova: “With specific reference to the disfigurement of the nascent struggles by the white working class in the United States because of the coeval existence of slavery, Marx famously proclaimed, ‘Labour in a white skin can never emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin’ (1867/1976:414). This, too, is a passage that Ferreira da Silva neglects to consider altogether.” Actually, this is an excellent quote, which shows how the Racial for De Genova, as for Marx, refers solely to race difference, that is, as a substratum or a datum that precedes the proper political (economic, ethic, and juridic) conditions under analysis. To be sure, precisely this distinction between race (racial difference or race difference) and the Racial seems to be at the core of the declarations (no arguments are made) that I misunderstood Marx and missed (or neglected) that he had done the work I am saying historical materialism cannot do or guide those of us interested in doing it.

Let me close by responding all too briefly to two comments that seem to be considering a pressing question: if historical materialism cannot do without its metaphysical and ontoespistemological intrastructure, but if you seem to be determined to hold on to its political ends, here named liberation, how to think it in connection to the abolitionist turn (Hardt) and how it reconfigures current political strategies (Mirzoeff)? My precarious response to their comments, which this question barely summarizes, is: yes, of course, let’s do it. Historical materialism is stuck in its conditions of possibility. However, I am not ready to forfeit the political goal it helps us to outline, as well as the elements for thinking it has gifted us towards doing so, which is the dissolution of the post-Enlightenment political architecture oriented towards eliminating and addressing its apparatus of extraction, and expropriation, and exploitation and the colonial, racial, cisheteropatriarchal matrix that supports it. However, liberation is not the descriptor I would use, not do I find it fitting to the task. That being said, I would not see it as a goal but as that which is activated in every instance of rebelry, in each and every moment of auto-defense—as refusal to die, to comply, and obey—which is another gift from the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation.