Cultural Dynamics

This article introduces the Cultural Dynamics book forum on Denise Ferreira da Silva's Unpayable Debt. The book examines the epistemological principles of Western thinking that make raciality and its practical implications for the contemporary world possible. Among Ferreira da Silva’s targets is Karl Marx’s theory of value. Commentators respond to the author’s argument, with debates on whether Marx's approach sufficiently addresses the role of race within capitalism. This introduction adds to the debate wondering whether Ferreira da Silva’s framing of Marx’s ideas inadvertently mirrors the post-Enlightenment pillars she criticizes in other philosophers, suggesting a potential misunderstanding of Marx’s dialectics. The article winds up by emphasizing the significance of Marx’s dialectics as a transformative tool to critique the commodity form and its power dynamics in a racialized world economy.

This response to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt (2022) takes seriously the author’s self-description as a scholar and artist, and so considers the study within a genealogy of contemporary experiments with the book form in the Americas. Unpayable Debt calls for a reader who will assemble its sequence of moments and texts into an accounting of the debt that Western epistemologies, disciplines, and habits of reading owe to the people and cultures subjected to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and to the dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples. Fiction, distinct from history and the other disciplines that use the written word, proves essential to calculate that liability, and Ferreira da Silva exercises its inventive power in her scholarly critique as much as in videos, performances, and social practice collaborations.

This essay asks what is “the image of unpayable debt”? I approach Ferreira da Silva’s assemblage from the angle delineated by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “image,” a multi-layered composite of time-spaces. I include Benjamin’s weak Messianism, via the democratic debt jubilee, and the general strike reconfigured for the present as the feminist strike against debt. The “image” formed in this process is multiple and sedimented with layers of time-space, containing a caesura. This “break” is comprised of weak Messianism and blackness. The essay concludes by asking how the debt-image can be projected into the world as the general strike.

I read Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt as an experiment that adopts “the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation” as an epistemological standpoint. This situates her project in line with a tradition of standpoint theories that adopt, for instance, the proletarian or the feminist standpoint in similar ways. These standpoints grant us not only a superior knowledge of the current social order, highlighting its hierarchies, but also provide a political ground for seeking to abolish the structures of domination. Ferreira da Silva’s argument diverges, however, in that her standpoint does not present a subject to be affirmed, as do the other theories, but rather one that must also be abolished. In this sense, I interpret the aim of da Silva’s book to be a double abolition.

This essay holds a conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s book, Unpayable Debt. Ferreira da Silva describes Unpayable Debt as a Black feminist reading tool that stages the onto-epistemological conditions for the unrelenting persistence of the Colonial and the Racial—modalities of power and violence—in the present, in/as global capital. A major part of the work performed by Ferreira da Silva with this reading tool is the re/de/composition of a Marxian theory of value. This work is intended to show that Marx’s analysis conceals gendered and racialized violence in the way it renders the dynamic of capitalist accumulation. In concurring with the urgency of Ferreira da Silva’s question and ensuing interrogation, I offer a different way of reading Marx’s theory of value, as a theory that illuminates how capital comes to mediate gendered and racialized subjugation, sustaining it through its dissimulation.

This response to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt (2022) takes up the question of violence and the role it plays in Karl Marx’s theorization of the capital-labor relation. Ferreira da Silva usefully highlights the way Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and David Harvey posit the violence of primitive accumulation as anterior or external to the theoretical analysis of the scene of value, including the contractual relation between the dramatis personae of the free worker and capitalist, a presupposition of the capitalist mode of production. In response, this engagement works through Marx’s mode of presentation in Capital Vol. 1, arguing that the historical chapters on primitive accumulation in section eight revise and retroactively condition our understanding of the presumptive equality between capitalist and worker. By structuring the depiction of the abstract and theoretical mode of production in this way, Marx’s methodology reveals the overlapping modalities of violence and their immanent relation to the juridical standing of the free worker. This essay closes by reassessing the status of the free worker, as well as Ferreira da Silva’s critique, considering current conditions of neoliberal accumulation.

This commentary critically engages Denise Ferreira da Silva’s claim that Marxism is incapable of critically engaging the racial and capital alongside one another. It argues that, while it is true that conventional Marxists have either dismissed, undertheorized, or treated enslaved and colonial labor as ancillary to capitalist development – so-called “primitive accumulation” – rendering non-Europeans, non-proletarian laborers (and especially women of African descent) as outside the universal category of the Human, this is not necessarily representative of either Marx or Marxism. Reading Unpayable Debt alongside recent work by Lisa Lowe, Beverley Mullings, Saidiya Hartman, Nick Nesbitt, and Gary Wilder, I suggest a revisit of Marx’s and Marxist’s analysis of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism is necessary – and particularly the much-neglected work of Walter Rodney – in order to probe the constitutive dynamics of race, class, and gender as a constituent part and critique of capitalism and the struggle for human freedom.

This essay argues that the figure of the circuit that recurs across Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt, which might be too easily treated as a passing metaphor, illuminates the book's most significant concerns: the problem of unity; relationships among the economic, the ethical, and the juridical; and the reticulated dynamics of ‘free’ labor and racialized slavery in the circulation of value. Building on Ferreira da Silva's references to circuitry, the essay posits the emergent, recursive circuits of cybernetic social theory and ecology as unintentional yet strikingly revealing diagrams of the capital-race dynamic.

In the effort to critically interrogate the state (and law) and global capital (and property) through Blackness as the enduring figure of the total violence of slavery and colonialism, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt (2022) centrally targets the Marxian critique of capitalism (or historical materialism) as the premier example of an Enlightenment conceptual apparatus that is simply “of no use.” This review rebuts Ferreira da Silva’s contentions regarding Marx and Marxian critiques. Marx identifies slavery, colonialism, genocide, and warfare as necessary foundations for the very possibility of capital accumulation, rendering the colonial and racial underpinnings of capital accumulation indispensable for any viable analysis of our contemporary sociopolitical world order. As the racialized figure of the enduring legacy of enslaved labor, then, Blackness is indeed crucial for a renewal and further radicalization of Marx’s theory of labor.

Unpayable Debt seeks to intervene in the collaborative task of assembling of a whole other analytical apparatus and political program. As a composition, it works in that moment. It does some of the groundwork necessary for designing the kind of shift in thinking needed for addressing what this global moment demands from us. In this response to the comments from readers who share in the same project, I highlight how, because the centrality of thinking in the modern context, its contribution to work on the double task, which also includes a treatment of the tools available for analyzing the political context – a task that demands an excavation and a mapping of their conditions of emergence, production, and deployment.