Epilogue: The Revenge of the Iron Chink

The epilogue offers a meditation on an exhibit featuring an early twentieth-century fish-gutting machine called the “Iron Chink” that personifies a racist slur. Artist Tommy Ting’s reanimation of the Iron Chink in his 2012 sculpture Machine (Iron Chink, invented in 1903, found at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Steveston, British Columbia, refabricated in Beijing, China) animates its contemporary significance. Examining how Ting’s sculpture recontextualizes the original machine, the epilogue reflects on the aesthetic and biological dimensions of capitalism that are tracked through the book. Probing the question of value in capitalism as the central motor of the metaphoric work of the fetish, the chapter ends by considering what it might mean to imagine human incommensurability in a world beyond commodity-determined labor.