The World Is Already without Us

This article revisits the problematic of the cognitive mapping of capital by probing the affinity between two representational predicaments: the depopulated nature of images of human-altered landscapes in the “new topographics” photography and its epigones, and the current debate over the definition of the Anthropocene. It looks in Fredric Jameson’s treatment of the time of capital, and of the place therein of dead labor, for a clue to critically rethink both these phenomena, revealing their profound affinity in the aporia besetting our thinking of historical agency under capitalist conditions. The article concludes with a brief reflection on what it might mean to define communism in this light as the “resurrection of dead labor.”

Figures in a Human-Altered Landscape

News outlets recently featured a scientific debate that could, with some irony, be dubbed Jamesonian.¹ In the context of the widespread conviction that we now inhabit the Anthropocene, an epoch in which mankind has risen to the dubious stature of “geological agent,” as the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus had already anticipated in the nineteenth century,² some earth scientists have cut through the periodizing controversy—did the Anthropocene begin with the human discovery of fire? with the industrial revolution?³—by dating the onset of mankind’s geological maturity with disconcerting precision: 16 July 1945, the first test detonation of an atomic bomb.

The (unconsciously) political character of periodization as an act of both representation and totalization could not be more clearly illustrated. While the atomic age fades uneasily from cultural consciousness, it resurfaces here in the paradoxical dating of a process whose extension along an unexperienceably long duration would seem to defy the urge to name the event and thus to assuage one’s ontological and methodological anxieties. Dating the Anthropocene according to what many have regarded as the apex of Promethean hubris seems to imply that the epoch be understood as that of nature’s collapse into history—in a discourse that projects human agency on a vast temporal and spatial scale at the very moment when mankind’s political capacity to master or even attenuate its material fate appears to be at its lowest ebb. The end of nature (as autonomous from human agency) here coincides with the end of history (as the inability to articulate that agency as a common project), and postmodernity receives a kind of geological imprimatur, by the same token losing its own temporal contours. “We” make nature, but in the act of recognizing this we also confront our inability to act historically, as natural processes inextricable from our historical agency threaten to make and unmake history—to thoroughly unmake it in the very process of finally and truly making it. If we place the terminological and periodizing debate over the Anthropocene in our conjuncture of interminable crisis—political, economic, ecological—it is hard not to see it as an implicit theory of species alienation, if by the latter term we grasp a kind of speculative identity between mastery and impotence, agency and subjection.

However, the narrative of irreversibility that dominates this discourse appears to occlude any horizon of disalienation, a process that has frequently been conceived as a kind of inversion or reversal. The ultra-humanism, so to speak, of the Anthropocene, where natural-historical agency is ascribed to humanity (irrespective of actual incarnation, in the atomic event in question, in the US military-industrial complex) also renders obsolete the political and philosophical humanisms that envisaged the end of alienation in a recognition and reappropriation of collective praxis. In narratives of the Anthropocene, the geological agency of mankind seems instead to overwhelm and obliterate the actions of human beings, especially by confecting a discourse of responsibility and guilt that is improbably intended to interpellate all equally. The periodizing and representational choice of the Anthropocene as the name of an epoch that seals the indiscernibility of history and nature—and threatens to absorb and collapse all historical or political periodizations—has already been met with trenchant challenges, some of which I touch on below. At their core lies the claim (variously articulated) that this formation of natural history is the outcome of the material agency of capital, as conceived in its natural, historical, epistemological, and logical aspects.

To treat the Anthropocene as a notion that exceeds in its very act of periodization any univocal material referent (say, a given quantity of isotopes of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, or a certain threshold of deforestation) is simply to be attentive to its status as a representation that strives to totalize and inform our natural history. From this vantage point, it would be instructive to consider how it has been prepared by a long and complex history of planetary consciousness, but especially a welter of discursive and aesthetic developments broadly congruent with, and even formative of, the cultural logics of postmodernity and globalization as delineated in Fredric Jameson’s writings—from Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. The 1960s flourishing of “globe talk”⁴ can be seen as an optimistic precursor to today’s rather more anxious acknowledgments of geological difference. Our own representational conundrums are arguably much closer to those crystallized in the very title of a landmark exhibition from 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.⁵ That show, bringing together photographic series by Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Joe Deal, and others, continues to inform photographic practices that try to picture humanity’s footprint in the terrains, built forms, logistical infrastructures, energy complexes, and sheer waste that simply are the landscape of an increasingly urbanized species—witness the work of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.

There is a rich, critical literature on New Topographics and its aftermath. What I wish to ask here is a disarmingly simple question: why are photographs of manufactured landscapes so often depopulated? This question was polemically advanced by Allan Sekula, in his militant skepticism about the aesthetics of what he termed the “neutron-bomb school of photography.” In his postscript to his photo essay “School Is a Factory,” with the aim of questioning the ambiguity of images that were poised between documentary and abstraction, Sekula dwelled on an image by Lewis Baltz taken in the same landscapes of the industrial park that Sekula himself had grasped as the occasion to reflect on the corporatization of minds and bodies.⁶ The waning of reference often ascribed to a late-modernist aesthetic was taken to task for combining a complaisant representation of late-capitalist logistical posturbanism with a compulsion to repeat or imitate the coordinates of modernist abstraction. Reference slipped from social space to aesthetics itself, as the photography performs a kind of nostalgia for pictoriality, an affiliation or aspiration to painterly abstraction.⁷

Sekula’s critique of this depoliticizing modernist haunting, present in much of his critical writing on photography’s history, is powerful, but it also includes a more sympathetic caveat, as he credits Baltz’s ambiguity with the capacity to echo “an ambiguity and loss of referentiality already present in the built environment.”⁸ This built environment, this logistical landscape of business parks, this abode (both hidden and ubiquitous) of capitalist reproduction—in which as Baltz noted you do not know whether what is being manufactured is pantyhose or megadeath, or, we could add, anything at all—is itself ambiguous in the sense that it is a really abstract space, shaped to an unprecedented extent by imperatives of accumulation and standardized integration that strip it of discernible singularity. A dialectical reading of Sekula’s twofold critique of capitalist and (late) modernist abstraction, which takes Baltz’s new topographic photography as its occasion, could in turn be the object of a further dialectical twist, as we come to recognize that to a large extent the falsity of Baltz’s representation is a falsity in the things themselves. That much, together with a specific anchoring in the atomic inception of the Anthropocene, is present in Baltz’s own writings.⁹

In a review of the fellow new topographics photographer Robert Adams’s influential New West, Baltz noted how the serried sprawl of tract houses that are the subject matter of much of Adams’s work are no longer the kind of structures we experience and perceive as true homes or shelters but, rather, resemble “the test structures built at ground zero.”¹⁰ This doesn’t just point us toward the intimate relation between the process of suburbanization and the postwar nuclear state; it gestures toward a kind of lethal abstraction, a convergence between the human-altered landscapes generated by the urbanization of capital and the ultimate human capacity to alter landscapes beyond recognition, beyond its very possibility. A preliminary answer to our question could then identify the aesthetic identity between human-altered and the human-absent landscapes, so to speak, as a combined product of Western traditions of landscape imagery, a late-modernist photographic harkening for pictorial abstraction, and the real abstraction of suburban, productive, destructive, and logistical spaces in late capitalism—which are in turn predicated, especially in the “new West,” on ongoing if often occluded histories of settler colonialism and racialized dispossession.

Extinguishing Labor

The work of the new topographics photographers, and of their many contemporary epigones, can be usefully framed as an answer—irrespective of the artists’ and curators’ motives—to the question of how capitalism is to be represented. It is in this light that Sekula’s comment about the ambiguity (between documentation and abstraction) that pervades Baltz’s photographs gains its full scope. Yet this world in which mankind (that imposing if precarious abstraction here standing in for a congeries of profit imperatives, legal apparatuses, settler-colonial dispositions, racial ascriptions, etc.) has altered humans out of the picture is a representation (of capital) that appears to block the path to anything like the aesthetic of cognitive mapping that Jameson called for in the 1980s (and not by name well before that) to provide an answer—at once political, artistic, and ideological—to a predicament in which a situational representation of one’s place within the totality of the capitalist mode of production had become for all intents and purposes impossible.¹¹

Taking as their very object the phenomenon that elicited from Kevin Lynch the planning notion of cognitive mapping in his Image of the City (the text later transcoded by Jameson), namely, the US postwar sprawl, those photographs of a human-altered landscape were precisely not photographs of landscapes that men and women could themselves alter, in the sense of a directed collective action. By the same token, they are not spaces for an oriented life but, rather, ones that, though not shorn of a certain specificity (the new West, by which we can understand both the US West and the planetary one), defeat the imagination of any possible praxis through their homogeneity, depopulation, and, not least, blank beauty. We could perhaps add these depopulated landscapes and the production of space they evince to the catalog of interlocking sources of the problem of cognitive mapping as variously posed by Jameson. They are not simply a crucial, antimonumental pendant to the justly famous reflections on Portman and Gehry’s hotels and homes in Postmodernism;¹² they can also supplement Jameson’s attention to such disorienting and depoliticizing processes as containerization and financialization, and to what in a more philosophical (Sartrean) vein he arrestingly terms the “demographic plebianization of my subjectivity”¹³ (the postcolonial realization that one lives amid a sprawling multitude of others) and, in a more firmly periodizing and Marxist vein, to imperialism itself¹⁴ (such that attention to the landscapes of the new West and their repressed histories demands inquiry into the place of settler colonialism in fantasies and foreclosures of historical agency).

Though its concern with the representation of capital is not conveyed in explicitly aesthetic terms, Jameson’s recent commentary on the first volume of Das Kapital contains what is arguably his most articulated theoretical answer to the problem of cognitive mapping, conceived as a product of the temporalizing and spatializing logic of capital. It also harbors a possible solution to the riddle posed by the persistence of depopulation as a trope in images that explicitly thematize our human-altered world, our Anthropocene without an anthropos. In a suitably dialectical twist, this illumination of the capital’s infrastructures and their representations comes in a chapter devoted to the time of Marx’s Capital (and of capital). Earlier in his commentary, Jameson sets the stage for this investigation by directing our attention to the crucial role that living labor power plays in resurrecting the dead labor sunk or congealed in fixed capital, in a duality between resurrection-production and extinction-destruction that he posits as fundamental to capital itself (and, a fortiori, to its representations and representability). He observes how

The quantitative past represents past labor precisely by erasing its very traces. And yet this drive to extinction is also behind the overpowering of our praxis and our imaginations by dead labor—or capital spatialized and experienced as the absence of labor, the absence of “us.”

In Jameson’s reading of volume 1 of Capital, this dynamic pivots around the Marxian verb auslöschen, “to extinguish,” identified as the linchpin of capitalist temporality and revealing “the present of production” as a restless negativity that “immediately converts [its] objectal result into the raw material of some other production” in what appears as an “apocalyptic process”¹⁶ (we will return in a moment to how this restless extinction-resurrection can be squared with the megamachines and megaruins—as well as the quotidian infrastructure—of capital that make up our human-altered landscapes). This dialectic of extinction directly concerns the question of how, or indeed if, capital as a movement can be represented, since the capitalist process, as Marx famously notes, appears to disappear in its product.

The matrix for the periodizing or figural search after the problem of cognitive mapping, and its multiple aesthetic answers, is thus anchored in a simple if momentous observation of Marx, which will spawn multiple visual inquiries, from Sergei Eisenstein to Alexander Kluge: “The taste of the porridge does not tell us who grew the oats, and the process we have presented does not reveal the conditions under which it takes place, whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash or the anxious eye of the capitalist.”¹⁷ Reification can thus be seen to define the everyday reality of commodity production. Stepping into the “hidden abode” itself, contrary to a widespread realist instinct, will not break the spell of this violently endless present, since when products of past labor enter a new production process (as means of production or processed raw materials), the fact that they are indeed products of past labor is, in Marx’s colorfully crude metaphor, “as irrelevant, as, in the case of the digestive system, the fact that the bread is the product of the previous labour of the farmer, the miller and the baker.”¹⁸

When living labor power seizes these products, these things, and “awaken[s] them from the dead,” as Marx declares,¹⁹ it is not as past but as present use values within a labor process overdetermined by the empty, homogenizing time of exchange value. As Jameson notes, the pastness, which is to say the thingness of these products, is only revealed—in Marx’s anticipation of the phenomenological doctrine of failure as ontological revelation, made famous by Heidegger’s hammer—when they break. Otherwise, the labor of resurrection, labor as resurrection (itself extinguished in the product, extinguished in and by resurrection), exists in a “supreme present of time.”²⁰ This is the time of labor as a paradoxically “extinguishing fire,” as (productive) consumption, which, when it comes to constant capital fixed in machines and raw materials, must (in a twofold process and temporality) both preserve and transfer the value that will retroactively be shown to have slumbered within them, raising them from the dead (and thus resurrecting them as something other than what they originally were, indeed resurrecting them in full indifference to their past as anything but potential values).

Yet this temporality of labor’s form-giving and form-taking fire is itself, according to Jameson, nested in the logical-historical temporality of absolute surplus value (and formal subsumption).²¹ Notwithstanding the fact that it makes the past of production representable only in its very extinction, it makes the present (and arguably the future, what will have been made) intelligible within a horizon of human praxis. This changes irreversibly (for now) through what Jameson calls “the dialectic of scale embodied in machinery itself.”²² As the organic composition of capital shifts ever higher ratios toward constant rather than variable capital, though the dialectic of labor’s extinguishing fire is not terminated, it is in a sense overwhelmed by “the immense quantity of . . . past labour now deployed.”²³ In Jacques Camatte’s lucid formulation this is an effect of the critical dynamic whereby “in capitalism, immediate labour, the labour of the living, enters production in a decreasing proportion, while the labour of the dead enters in an increasing proportion.”²⁴

Now, although Jameson noted the reifying erasure of the past that defines the social ontology (and aesthetics) of the commodity itself, he holds that in the “earlier moment” (before manufacture), “the past labor embodied in the raw materials and in tools stood in a ratio to the human labor power which was certainly exploitative, but nonetheless relatively mappable or representable, relatively thinkable in human terms.”²⁵ As the individual laborer becomes but an adjunct, a supervisor (when not simply superfluous), dead labor takes center stage, or rather, it becomes the stage, the human-altered landscape in which men and women increasingly appear as supplements, extras, or surplus. (Fears and representations of a Malthusian catastrophe, say, in the demographic horror of the 1973 movie Soylent Green, are but the obverse of this, finding their pivot in Marx’s account of surplus populations: viewed through the prism of labor’s absorption and repulsion, of its own extinguishing, the aesthetics of depopulation and overpopulation are intimately, if antinomically connected.)

In a crucial and arresting passage, Jameson advances what I think is the nucleus of a powerful and far more precise (if not exhaustive) updating of the problem of cognitive mapping than the one advanced in Postmodernism and contiguous texts,²⁶ which links the spatializing dynamics of constant capital, and of capital’s accelerating disproportion in its organic composition, directly to the collapse of time as experienced individually and historically, thereby neutralizing the widespread temptation to treat cognitive mapping as a primarily spatial problem:

In the context of our discussion of the new topographics, the irony of Jameson’s slippage from a Gargantuan, plethoric accumulation of dead labor to “huger storage facilities” is not lost, but I wish to pause on that “quantities of the past” that so pithily encapsulates the collapsing of time into space that belongs to this dynamic. In this light, the manufactured landscapes of contemporary photography can be seen to make visible these quantities, but not as past. In this sense they accompany, rather than reveal or orient, that vast spatiotemporal estrangement that Jameson thinks in line with Sartre’s vision of an antipraxis in the Critique of Dialectical Reason: man altered, alienated by man-altered landscapes, in which all praxis seems to be snuffed out, abstracted, extinguished.

The disappearance of the past is an objective appearance, but it is also the form of its massive if unconscious presence. The dialectical transformation linked to the rising organic composition of capital, this silent rise of the machines, can thus be seen, in what only appears as a paradox, as a way in which the past (of production) is “immensely more present at the same time that it is invisible, having been effaced in the process of its own ‘extinguishing.’”²⁸ And while we could speculatively correlate the rising organic composition of capital to a waning of history, viewed from the standpoint of capital, there “is more of the past now (in the form of dead or stored labor) to be resurrected.”²⁹ In other words, the past can never be experienced as past, but by that very same token, it dominates the present—as that which operationally and retroactively exist as resurrected value. Manufactured landscapes—along with the “ruin porn” photography that so fascinates the contemporary imagination and the entire “world without us” franchise—thus stand revealed as ciphers of this conjuncture of the hypertrophy of the material past with the seeming vanishing of the historical past.

Anthropocene or Capitalocene

The social ontology of the material past and the (anti)aesthetics of constant capital sketched out in Jameson’s Marx commentary can also provide a different angle on the mainstream debate about a human-altered geology and climate. That debate is one that orbits around a notion of species agency and a representation of history that, in most versions, lend themselves rather easily to ideology critique. As already intimated above, the ascription of geological agency to humanity treats by analogy with an individual act—and its customary matrix of intention, responsibility, and perhaps reparation—a widely and extremely unevenly distributed (in space and time, geography and history) multitude of actions, whose potentially catastrophic consequences are here used to unify the species as a subject of nature, precisely when the subject of history has long become an object of tired mockery. The thesis whereby the most ideologically mystifying acts are the ones that posit a false universalization here seems to find poignant corroboration.

In this vein, Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg have diagnosed the fallacies and fetishisms of the Anthropocene with great lucidity, noting how in light of the staggering variations in energy usage and the social relations underlying it, “humanity seems far too slender an abstraction to shoulder the burden of causality.”³⁰ Moreover, in the Anthropocene narrative’s elision of the social agencies of capital accumulation, colonial and racial domination, patriarchy, and class conflict, the very articulation between historical agency and natural causality creates a kind of false immanence of man to nature, in which the price to be paid for acknowledging human society’s impact on nature is no longer to treat it as society. Or, in the authors’ dialectical formulation: “Climate change is denaturalised in one moment—relocated from the sphere of natural causes to that of human activities—only to be renaturalised in the next, when derived from an innate human trait, such as the ability to control fire.”³¹ The forgetting of unevenness is also the forgetting of the real historical conditions of energy exploitation—and not the “trivial” conditions of humanity’s burning of wood, which have no teleological bond to CFCs or shale oil, for instance—that can make sense of the phenomena classed under the heading of the “Anthropocene,” to be sought in the “globalized technological systems [that] essentially represent an unequal exchange of embodied labour and land in the world-system.”³² The authors soberly conclude, also in light of the massively unequal effects of climate change on axes of class, race, and empire that “if climate change represents a form of apocalypse, it is not universal, but uneven and combined: the species is as much an abstraction at the end of the line as at the source.”³³

Inspired by a related Marxist critique of prevailing ecological dis course—though dissenting from Malm and Hornborg on the question of periodization, and seeing the long sixteenth century as the historical watershed rather than the Industrial Revolution’s nexus of coal and capital—Jason W. Moore has proposed that we dub our epoch the Capitalocene, thereby identifying the social relation best suited to stand in as the agent (itself a very limited concept) for irreversible geological and climactic change. Against the grain of some of Jameson’s pronouncements on the end of nature, Moore’s proposal depends on trying to articulate the immanence of capital and nature, to break through what he perceives as the dissonance in a green thought that oscillates between a theoretical assumption of the idea of humanity-in-nature and a rhetoric and praxis that rely on their separation. This is not to say that Moore simply rejects that separation; it is a real appearance, a real abstraction: capital reproduces itself by producing an abstract social nature. In Moore’s alternative formulation: “Capitalism, as project, emerges through a world-praxis that creates external natures as objects to be mapped, quantified, and regulated so that they may service capital’s insatiable demands for cheap nature. At the same time, as process, capitalism emerges and develops through the web of life; nature is at once internal and external.”³⁴

Moore’s proposal is very rich and redolent with challenges not just for mainstream ecological thought but for Marxism itself, especially in what concerns the latter’s theories of value and labor. While I cannot do it any justice, I think that, in critical dialogue with the arguments advanced by Malm and Hornborg and other Marxist critics of contemporary ecological narratives, Moore allows us to reflect on the specific ways in which today’s thinking of ecological catastrophe and human agency conspires in not representing capital. The visible, palpable, disastrous—but also abstract and uncertain—mutation of the conditions of society-in-nature is totalized in the Anthropocene by a kind of pseudoagency that is all the more perplexing in that it simultaneously signals the collapse of all the humanist ideals of progress and enlightenment that saw mankind’s mastery over history and nature as both possible and desirable. And while consequent collective historical action in the present—not even by humanity but by a class, a nation, a community, even a single municipal administration—appears as increasingly fantastical, mankind rises to the status of a geological agent. The debate around the Anthropocene event, its date of inception, with which I began, ironically marks this short-circuit between supposedly being able to think a geological time scale and being entirely rudderless when it comes to cognizing historical difference in the present.

It is theoretically vital, though it largely exceeds the confines of this essay, to bring this ideological and political-economic critique of the dominant narrative of the Anthropocene into dialogue with those projects of historical epistemology that—often in the wake of Foucault’s Order of Things—have traced the emergence and phases of mankind as a subject of history and thus of material and natural mastery. This process, reliant on the epistemological and political inclusive exclusion of others dispossessed of rational agency and personality—whether as merely natural, inferior, subaltern, or abject—profoundly conditions the very parameters through which we envision or represent the geological agency of humanity. The false horizon of planetary human agency depends on (to return to the new West) neglecting to define, for instance, who is doing the depopulating and who is suffering and resisting it. In this respect, the arguments of Malm and Hornborg and of Moore could be revisited in light of Sylvia Wynter’s effort to propose an “embattled humanism” (the formulation is David Scott’s) on the basis of a diagnosis, itself borrowing from Frantz Fanon, of our “sociogenic code”: the “principle/code that is constitutive of the multiple and varying genres of the human in the terms of which we can alone experience ourselves as human.”³⁵ This “code of symbolic/life that institutes our genres of being human”³⁶ is one whose humanism is profoundly restrictive; it is “an ethno-class or Western-bourgeois form of humanism, whose truth-for at the level of social reality, while a truth-for-Man, cannot be one for the human.”³⁷ Wynter’s question regarding the interlinking of race and humanism is one that resonates profoundly with the critique of the Anthropocene sketched herein: “What if, following up on Marx, we were to propose that this insistent degradation, this systemic inferiorization, is an indispensable function of our ongoing production and reproduction of our present bioeconomic conception of the human, of its governing sociogenic principle?”³⁸

Communism and the Resurrection of Dead Labor

I conclude, in light of the above arguments, with how Jameson’s reflection on the time of Capital may also hold some further clues for those wishing to consider the emergence of this strange new name for our present. That geological rather than historical time dominates our consciousness testifies to the pervasive formal and material apparatus of forgetting that Jameson tracked down to the rising ratio of constant over variable capital. The past of production is extinguished of its historical dimension in the process of valorization, and when it is expelled from its circuits it appears as a melancholy trace whose apparent legibility hides our own mystification about its origins.

Some of the theories that accompany our prurient gaze over the ruins of Detroit are almost as arbitrary as those that ufologists posit about the Nazca lines of Peru. The manufactured landscapes that serve as the aesthetic correlate of narratives of the Anthropocene join together two separate moments that Jameson highlights in the exposition of Capital—the revelation of a product in the breakdown of its use value to the labor process, and the looming sublimity of the unthinkably vast quantity of constant capital commanded by contemporary capital accumulation. The landfills, airplane graveyards, coal mountains, and landscapes of extraction that populate (or depopulate) Edward Burtynsky’s volume of photographs Oil, for instance, could be read as so many planetary projections of the broken tools of which Marx spoke in Capital—except that they and their viewers don’t often do the representational work of revealing or recovering the past labor (paid and unpaid, free and forced) that had entered into their production. Labor’s extinguishing fire is itself representationally extinguished (adapting Sekula on Baltz, we could say that some, though not all, of this extinction is real). Marx himself, in the very passage that Jameson had indicated as a precursor of the “phenomenological doctrine of the relationship between consciousness and failed acts,” had observed that “a machine which is not active in the labour process is useless. In addition, it falls prey to the destructive power of natural processes. Iron rusts; wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit is cotton wasted. Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values.”³⁹

Many of the human-altered landscapes of the present appear to be landscapes beyond resurrection. Much of the reason for this could be sought in the vanishing of labor from the visual field of northern capitalist ideology, from the political aesthetics of the present. The ruins of Detroit are thus readable as an objective allegory of the twin deaths of living and dead labor (apparent deaths of course, since the great undead, capital, lives in and lives on these very appearances, not least through property speculation). But the call to restore the practical and representational rights of living labor—against the death of agency or the pseudo-agency of the anthropos, which will always find itself represented by one capitalist avatar or other—is powerless if it does not traverse the problem that Jameson has captured as that of the “quantities of the past” all around us. It is those quantities that do not just lie behind our visual need to tarry with human-altered landscapes and our attraction to the superficially unified agency of the species; they also account, at least in part, for what the German philosopher Günther Anders termed the “Promethean imbalance” (and its ensuing “Promethean shame”):⁴⁰ we are humiliated by the very machines and technologies we have produced. Their seemingly limitless power of production, but especially destruction (the nuclear bomb), reveals our pitiful embodiment. Where Anders continues to treat the agency of humanity as potentially unified, even in the negative image of its humiliation and collapse, Jameson’s Marx interpretation provides a way of thinking through the origin of our power and our impotence, through the sources of our Promethean imbalance and the often paralyzing shame that our representations of production entail.⁴¹

Instead of simply conjuring workers out of the shadows of their own seclusion or superfluity, such a thought, were it to orient itself toward reflecting on the meaning of praxis in our human-altered landscape, might want to approach the question from the inverse direction, that of dead labor—provided that we conceive of that labor not only as dead waged labor but as the multiple “work” that has been appropriated by capital through various strategies of dispossession and of what Wynter called “insistent degradation” and “systemic inferiorization.”⁴² As capital continues to exploit the congealed work of past generations, but also to abrogate use values no longer fit for exchange, we may need to reflect further on the practical implications of Jacques Camatte’s heretical definition of communism as “the resurrection of dead labour.”⁴³ This intuition has been developed at some length by Moishe Postone, who, in an interesting counterpoint to Jameson’s reading, considers the emancipation from labor in the horizon of a world of dead labor no longer framed as the direct embodiment of living labor but as “the objectification of historical time,” the possibility of “the full utilisation of a history alienated no longer.”⁴⁴

Yet one must resist the temptation in such accounts—an effect of emphasizing capital’s production of sameness at the cost of its production of difference—to unify communist agency (or postcapitalist praxis) in a way that, while not as mystified as the positing of an agency of the human as such, nevertheless also occludes the present and future existence of unevenness and difference. As Henri Lefebvre taught us, the abstract landscapes of dead labor are both homogeneous and broken, simultaneously.⁴⁵ Efforts to resurrect dead labor, to use accumulated historical time and agency beyond the imperatives of capital, will perhaps need to invent forms of being both heterogeneous and united.

An earlier version of this article was delivered as a talk at the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon in April 2015. I thank the museum and the organizers for their kind invitation, and my dear comrade Jürgen Bock for his hospitality. I also thank the anonymous Social Text reviewers for their perceptive suggestions.

Notes

References