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298 CHAPTER THIRTEEN Capitalizing Humanity The Global Disposition of People and Things Pheng Cheah In the wake of September 11, 2001, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there has been a spate of books by theory scholars in the humanities on pressingly “real” geopolitical issues of violence, terror, and war that seem to suggest a turn in theory today away from the so-called linguistic or representational turn begun by the reception of so-called French poststructuralism in the English-speaking world. Such a conclusion is misleading because these geopolitical phenomena are analyzed in exactly the same theoretical manner as before: they are acts, processes or institutionalized structures of repression or oppression that function by means of the discursive or representational construction of a hegemonic subject and its demonized or excluded other. One key reason for this insistence on the importance of representation in all spheres of human existence was the desire to escape the economic reductionism of Marxist theory, even that of Althusserian Marxism, which spoke of “the determination in the last instance by the economic” even if “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes” (Althusser 1990, 113). Today, however, the shortcomings of this linguistic turn are becoming increasingly apparent in the general reluctance and abject inability of theory to engage with the complexity of economic processes that make up our contemporary era of globalization. This inability surfaces most clearly in the dubious attempt to extend the analytical framework of exclusion through discursive construction to all spheres of human existence. But can we adequately understand contemporary capitalist accumulation in terms of processes of violent exclusion dressed up with the vocabulary of biopolitics? It is certainly an increasingly common view that there is a fundamental continuity between extreme forms of military violence Capitalizing Humanity • 299 in warfare and quotidian forms of exclusion and degradation in political, economic , and social life within the borders of nation-states. This continuity, it is suggested, renders indistinguishable two spheres that are conventionally regarded as analytically distinct because they function according to different principles—the sphere of domestic order that is governed by right and law, and the sphere of defensive or aggressive relations between sovereign states and relations between a sovereign state and dangerous flows across territorial borders that require emergency measures. In the latter, legality is merely a catachresis because sovereign states have absolute power and the ability to make the exceptional decision to decide on the exception and to suspend the law. But this power of the exceptional decision, it is implied, is now increasingly employed within domestic order itself and this is best seen in the militarization of many processes in daily life. This argument, of course, alludes to Marx’s account of primitive accumulation (die ursprüngliche Akkumulation, literally, original accumulation). “Normal ” capitalist accumulation, Marx contended, is premised on the violent expropriation of the means of production from the worker so that he is forced to consent “freely” to sell his labor as a commodity. The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the actualization of their labour [Verwirklichungsbedingungen der Arbeit]. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations , whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as “primitive” because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production that corresponds to capital. . . . To become a free seller of labour-power, who carries his commodity wherever he can find a market for it, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules of apprentices and journeymen, and their restrictive labour regulations. Hence the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But on the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they [13...

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