Surplus Bodies: Santiago Sierra's Exploitive Remuneration

Chapter 5 probes the racialized extraction of labor-power from so-called surplus populations in the emergent category of delegated performance as exemplified by Santiago Sierra’s 133 Persons Paid to Have Their Hair Dyed Blonde. Sierra located and identified a contradiction implemented by the state form to legally distribute the very value of human life and, within the brutal parameters of capitalist value, its very right to self-valorization. Critically expanding on lacunae in Marx’s analysis and contributing to a larger structural understanding of the totality of capitalist social relations, this chapter explores the way in which any given labor pool is divided into those relations that are mediated by a wage and those that are not. This form of mediation is then rationalized by deference to categories of identity that retroactively legitimize division in the brutality with which labor-power is extracted.