The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present

Three: The Real Subsumption of Subjectivity by Capital

Three The Real Subsumption of Subjectivity by Capital Mass intellectuality is at the center of quite an instructive paradox. One can locate its main characteristics in different functions within labor, but above all at the level of metropolitan habits, in linguistic usages, in cultural consumption. Nonetheless, it is precisely when production no longer seems to offer an identity that it projects itself onto each and every aspect of experience, that it beats into submission linguistic abilities, ethical propensities, and the nuances of subjectivity . . . [Mass intellectuality] demands, thus, a noneconomic critique of political economy. —Paolo Virno, “Notes on the General Intellect” R E A L S U B S U M P T I O N In the discarded draft of the sixth section of Capital entitled “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” two problems appear in close proximity, which can be described broadly as follows: first, an investigation into the subjective conditions and effects of the development of the capitalist mode of production, and second, the tendency or development of the capitalist mode of production, its internal historicity . Even though these two problems appear together, their relation is not explicitly thematized or developed. This is due in part to the fact that while the latter constitutes the specific problem of the text the former is only developed in a series of divergent problems and allusions (a point that will be returned to later). Thus this draft, left out of the final published version of the first volume of Capital, proves useful for this book in the way that it presents together the historical development of the capitalist mode of production and the problem of the immanent relation of the mode of production to subjectivity. 103 From a cursory reading of this text it is possible to arrive at two different conclusions with respect to the relation between subjectivity and the development of the capitalist mode of production. First, what Marx calls “real subsumption”—the restructuring of social relations according to the demands of capitalist valorization —is identified by an increasing mystification of the capitalist relation. As capital puts to work science, technology, and the embodied knowledges of the collective, it increasingly appears as if capital itself is productive. Thus subjectivity, at least in the sense of the subjective beliefs and perceptions regarding the constitution of society and the formation of wealth, what I referred to in chapter 1 as “the society effect,” would seem to be entirely fashioned by capital. At the same time, Marx argues that as the cooperative and social powers of labor develop the capitalist mode of production becomes increasingly dependent on social knowledge , cooperation, and communication. Wealth is no longer produced by bodies put to work in the closed spaces of the factory but by knowledge, communication, and interactions throughout society. This simultaneous recognition of subjectivity as pure “subjection” and subjectivity as collective power, combined with the fact that all of this is developed in an abandoned draft, would seem to suggest that we are at a, if not the, “limit” of Karl Marx’s thought. This is the limit of futurity, the point at which an analysis based on an examination of existing tendencies attempts to project the course of those tendencies and finds itself caught in the undecidable tension between tendencies: The simple fact that all divergent and contradictory tendencies cannot be realized at the same time.1 (Contrary to what many maintain today, Marx’s relation to teleology is much more complex than a simple proclamation regarding the imminent demise of capitalism.) This limit (I am referring specifically to the relation between the historical development of capitalism and subjectivity) is the position from which we approach Marx. What for Marx was the tension between two different tendencies , which may or may not realize themselves in the future, are for us, and those who come after Marx, elements of the present. This imposes a particular task on reading Marx that is more complex than simply distinguishing between correct and incorrect prophesy, as if Marx was some sort of nineteenth-century Nostradamus looking into the future for the shape of things to come. The problem with such a strategy of reading is that it takes its bearings from the hubris of the present, the idea that history reaches its end point with us.2 Rather, the difficult task is to recognize the specific way in which various tendencies have realized themselves, or failed to, in the history of capitalism, while at the same time...