Browsing by Author "Brand, Carina"

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    The Extraction of Life in Communicative Capitalism: Reinterpreting Relative and Absolute Surplus Value
    (2016-09-09) Brand, Carina
    The extraction of surplus value is the defining moment between capitalist and worker, but how do we address this relationship under digital capitalism where what defines work and life, or production and reproduction is intentionally blurred. In this paper I will develop an argument around the way that our lives are an increasing source of value for capital, by drawing on post Operaismo, and Marxist feminist’ readings of reproduction. Ursula Huws points to the continued privatisation of public services as one move to increased commodification or the extraction from the commons. This case demonstrates the way the sphere of reproduction – that is life outside of our work life, has increasingly become a source of value for capital. This same transformation can be seen in the digital commons, but more specifically the way all social relations and communications are enacted and thus controlled through digital and communicative capitalism. I will then reinterpret Marx’s formulation of absolute and relative surplus value in relation to the way digital technology both extends and transforms time and develops new technology to enable new ways of extracting value from all aspects of our life. This by no means ignores the global relationship of extraction proper, but seeks to understand the role of machines in extracting value. I will argue, in line with Christian Fuchs’ reading of digital labour, that Marx’s analysis of absolute and relative surplus value provides an illuminating template for understanding extraction and digital capitalism. However I will point out where there are limits to Marx’s approach and explain that by using a Marxist feminist approach we are able to understand the way capitalism is transforming non-value producing activities into value producing, or commoditised ones.
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    Gender, identity and material: Film screening
    (The Royal Academy of Arts, 2017-03-04) Brand, Carina
    Synophresia Nervosa is set in the terrain of the studio and concerned with the idea of the ‘creative’ subject or artist, and the points at which ideas are extracted. It follows a group of artists as they face changes through the implementation of the ‘ideas lab’. I identify the problem of ‘brain drain’ in the ideas lab in relation to Marx’s idea of the general intellect and mass intellectuality as resource of accumulation. I ask if artists are a source of value, how are they remunerated for this value under capitalism? I consider the ways in which extraction and the exchange-abstraction both reflect on, and respond to the conditions of post-Fordism.
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    A Materialist Re-reading of Abject Art: Non-reproduction, Abjection and Aesthetics
    (2017-09-21) Brand, Carina
    The article uses a materialist approach to readdress ‘abject art’. Abject art makes the body, its wastes and states not only the subject but also the material of art practice; it mimics the excessive productive waste of capital and critiques the ever-compromised and unequally exploited state of gendered, sexed and raced bodies under biopolitical capitalism. While North America saw a culmination of art that was deemed abject in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the abject in visual culture and theory became a Western global phenomenon by the mid 1990’s. Therefore I ask if the concept of the abject is an important tool for understanding the body under capitalism? By 1990 both the UK and US had endured a decade of neoliberal conservatism and ensuing welfare reform, leading one to deduce that ‘abject art’ is symptomatic of encroaching constraints on the social body. Therefore I will make the claim that abject art is inherently tied to the sphere of social reproduction. I argue that while all of the processes and materials necessary for social reproduction are not abject; blood, semen, vomit, breast milk and faeces, and the maternal body are predominantly confined to the sphere of social reproduction. I locate the abject within Karl Marx’s Capital, Georges Bataille’s ‘Les Miserables’ and Marxist feminism, and purport that the law of accumulation produces abjection. This then sets into motion a conflict between the abject as a by-product of capital (that should be rejected) and conversely its redeployment as an emancipatory language and material of the exploited. These contradictions are explored through three distinct historical periods and works of art, asserting that abject art need not be confined to the 1990’s. Beginning with the 1960’s Japanese artistic collectives Zero Jigen and Hi Red Centre, whose performances that clean or pollute, operate as a response to American imperialism and Japan’s ‘economic miracle’. Secondly 1970’s feminist visceral and ‘maintenance’ performance that reflects a period of economic stagnation and neoliberalism’s ‘roll back’ of services; discussing the work of Barbara Smith, Ana Mendieta and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Finally I consider global abject art and culture in the 1990’s, addressing the aesthetics of abject waste in Trainspotting (1996) and exploring the idea of non-reproduction as a resistive stance to reproductive capitalism in the work of ‘sick’ Bob Flanagan, and Cheryl Donegan
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    A Materialist Reading of Abject Art: Performance, Social Reproduction and Capitalism
    (Open Library of Humanities, 2021-02-01) Brand, Carina
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    The Necropolitics of Reproduction: Black Feminism, Mothers and the Death Drive
    (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021-10-22) Brand, Carina
    Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many – they are few!' This idea of the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist thought and strategies.
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    The Necropolitics of Social Reproduction
    (2017-11-11) Brand, Carina
    The paper will use Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to investigate the role of social reproduction in capitalism. Absent from Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics is the role of gender, the mother and sphere of the home as integral to colonialism, war and both the necropolitical and biopolitical. Because the sphere of social reproduction is the very locus of life, can we assume that it is also the locus of death? Marxist Feminists argue capitalism is reliant on the production of life (that only woman can give) and because capitalism will strive to squeeze as much surplus from its workers (thus causing poverty) we are caught in a cycle of needing life but giving suspended death. I will discuss a range of films that focus on the domain of the home, or social reproduction and extend Mbembe’s analysis from the public state of necropolitics and biopolitics to the central role of biological reproduction, the home and the concept of the mother and family in necropolitical, fascist and capitalist economies. In investigating the historically contingent concepts of life and death in relation to the sphere of social reproduction under capitalism we can illuminate the way that value is ascribed, or inscribed to the reproducing body or sphere. Values are placed with varying degrees on certain bodies and social reproductive activities, and as Mbembe identifies with necropolitics it is under complete political and economic domination that we see the living dead.
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    Rupture, Extraction and Blurred Lines: an Exploration of the Politics and Aesthetics of Liminality in the Films Synophresia Nervosa and Private Life
    (2017-06-22) Brand, Carina
    The paper will screen and discuss sections from my films Synophresia Nervosa (2014) and Private Life (2015). Both films place the concept of extraction as central to the work, but this concept is extended to encompass ideas of rupture, blurred lines and theft. The aesthetic and political consequences of liminality are explored and extended in relation to the concept of subjectivity and creativity, and what is lost or taken in the creative process, or more explicitly what is extracted by capitalism. I also interrogate the virtual as a liminal space that subverts and blurs the lines between the private and work. Arguing through post-operaismo that our lives and experiences have become a kind of social factory for capital. Synophresia Nervosa is set in the artists’ studio and explores the idea of the ‘creative’ subject or artist, and the points at which ideas are extracted. I identify the problem of ‘brain drain’ in the ideas lab in relation to Marx’s idea of the general intellect. The film considers the way transformations of the artistic ‘technique’ borrow from the extractive technique, or conversely the way capitalism borrows from art through by the subjectification of extraction; this subjectification of extraction is made explicit by the sacrifice of body parts and mind. Private Life follows a manager and those he manages, as he faces constraints put on him by the administration of the virtual system ‘Persochip’. Persochip facilitates the blurring between work and life and I will explain the ways capitalism uses technology (relative surplus value) to augment time (absolute surplus value) and space and blur the lines between production and reproduction. Using Lazzarato’s conception of the subject, I will explain that these ‘machines’ are created and constructed through the employment of our own subjectivity.
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    Social Reproduction and Simple Reproduction: The Gift to Capital and the Commodified Home
    (Historical Materialism, 2016-11-11) Brand, Carina
    In considering Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction and the Lotta Feminista agenda more broadly, we find some of the first critiques of Marx that locate a form of value production in the home and in the sphere of social reproduction. However Fortunati’s proposition has often been misread, critics wrongly interpreting that exchange value is created in the home. However as Maya Gonzalez rightly clarifies the movement of Wages For Housework was not about the apparent valorization of housework as productive work, but was about understanding the relationship capital had with social reproduction, and more specifically the capitalist family. It is about understanding the way in which use values, and specifically labour power, is created and maintained in the home. And then considering how and at what cost these use values are transformed into exchange value in the sphere of production. At no point does Fortunati argue that washing dishes directly creates surplus value, but it does maintain the reproduction of labour power that is enacted in the factory, and most importantly it does this seemingly for free. This ‘free’ resource was constructed through the ideological formation of the family under capitalism, and what is important to consider in the relationship is the whole cycle of capitalist reproduction. Part of this whole cycle is the reproduction of labour power.