**Links to**: [[Marx]], [[Capitalism]], [[Desire]], [[Exchange]], [[Value]], [[Desire and Capital]], etc. Never forget [[The bodies of all those people who did not ask to be bodies]]. Soujourner Truth image. ____ >“… the practical reality of commodity exchange is not experienced _as_ practice … Consciousness is necessarily false: it does not _express_ the social relation (the system of impersonal practices) that is its essence; it _represses_ it.” Brassier, CiT, CiA, 2023, p. 118. Human life is social. Consciousness is social. The commodity, money, etc. (real abstractions) turn the social, whatever can be made consciously accessible and intelligible, into an impersonal network of falsely reified value structures. In the extension of things as they actually take place (in total praxis), in the unconscious (what is cognitively inaccessible), as well as in the yet-uintelligible (what has not been theorized/represented and socialized), we do not know this is happening. False consciousness about the social workings of production emerges, leading to an inevitable alienation. ___________ ### The (holy) grail In [[Sven Lütticken]]'s _Shine and Schein_, 2015. >”And is the grail not the ultimate phantasmagorical commodity? In Adorno's musicological analysis of Lohengrin's passage, he notes that “in that it gives solace, the phantasmagoria is that of the grail itself [als Trost spendende ist die Phantasmagorie die des Grals selber].”{footnote: Theodor W. Adorno, _Versuch über Wagner_ in _Die musikalischen Monographien. Gesammelte Schriften 13_, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 83.}” >”[[Wagner]]’s works, particularly the appearances of the _Nibelungenhort_ in _Der Ring_ and of the Grail in _Parsifal,_ are crucial concatenations of aesthetic _schein_ and commodified shine.” >”In the Middle Ages and early modern period, the Grail had been a purely literary symbol. For all its theological underpinnings, it had and still has no status in traditional Christianity. “The Holy Grail” simply does not exist in Catholic or Protestant Christianity, as concept or as object. From the early twentieth century onwards there have been repeated attempts to identify “the Holy Grail” with some concrete vessel. ... Monty Python drew the logical conclusion from this materialist grail by having an early draft of their _Holy Grail_ screenplay end at Harrods: if Harrods has everything, the Holy Grail can surely be found at this temple of conspicuous consumption.” Indeed: the empty vessel rings true (Coil). The eternal question of half-full versus half-empty is answered by the holy grail. Aparta de mim ese Chalice (Chico Buarque): the cult, drink from the cup, etc. The heart as grail? Remember Trey. >”The Grail succeeds as a commodity precisely insofar as it is a void, an empty but infinitely suggestive signifier that can be interpreted in numerous ways. But what does the esoteric and New Age “dematerialization” of the Grail—which, again, is a privileged object for the discussion of _Schein_ and shine—mean for the production of shine? If the grail—i.e., value–is to be located in us, then which consequences does this have for contemporary shine? In the politico-aesthetic economy of the Grail, its increasing symbolization and occultation suggest that once again, all that it solid is in the process of melting into thin air.” "So what, if anything, has changed? The technological intensification of opacity has made the jump from merely quantitative to qualitative. Production of phones in China is one thing; algorithmic high-frequency trading impacting not only the value of companies but the fate of whole nations is another. Now that our political techno-economy is producing invisibilities to such an extent that we might polemically state that we inhabit a post-visual culture, images are no longer even fetishistic disavowals of productive relations but rather means of production among others. Are films still made to be watched, or to watch us? Are products not already a kind of reconnaissance drones, smart Spimes (to use Bruce Sterling’s term) that cannot only be tracked across networks, but that also track us in return, accruing information on their users? {footnote: Bruce Sterling, _Shaping Things_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).} What we need is not a neoscholastic ontology but a form of _psycho materialism_ that acknowledges that the always instable and nonlinear dialectic of subject and object is now one of subject, object, and algorithm. {footnote: “Psycho Materialism” is the title of a symposium organized by Kerstin Stakemeier and Tim Voss in Worpswede.}" ______________ ### Flesh and blood >”While the accumulation from planter capital was one register of extraction, the accumulation from the violence of taking place across multiple registers of belonging was another. The very fungiblity of the commodity allowed Blackness to become mobilized as an ontological possibility within inhuman categories, but conversely, the carceral logic of geologic grammars renders Blackness as flesh, matter, and subject position. The fantasy was to assert commodity value of persons through the rendering of a nonagentic materiality (flesh) to generate surplus value, thereby disfiguring the black subject. Hartman argues that the slave is the essential subject as object, an object to whom anything can be done. The first step in this process of dehumanization is the metamorphosis of human into inhuman thing. The discipline of geology is intrinsic to this structural inscription of subjects into matter-objects or property. Compartmentalization and categorization of matter produce the fungibility of the slave as “thing” and the grammar of “thingification.”" Kathryn Yussoff, p. 76. >”As Hartman (1997, 26) argues, “the fungibility of the commodity, specifically its abstractness and immateriality, enabled the black body or blackface mask to serve as the vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment.” The properties of the enslaved “are ontologized as the innate capacities” of the slave property (26). These innate capacities are properties to be worked and channeled, likened to the band of iron that made the ring that held the slaves. These properties for extraction and labor are also tied to the social reproduction of Whiteness; through forced reproduction and rape of the enslaved (or, in Hartman’s words, subjection to desire without consent); and in the use of extracted energy for generating the organization of economies of valuation. The instigation of slavery was prompted by a recognition of the so-called properties of African physiology, where indigenous Indians were viewed as not robust enough for mining and plantation work. What is apparent is that the slave and the mineral are recognized in regimes of value, but only so much as they await extraction (where Whiteness is the arbiter and owner of value)." Ibid. p. 77. >”Refusing the path of self-destruction, either through persistence in the violent property relation or through suicide, “flying Africans” (Synder 2015) was a genre that presented a possibility of “Making a Way Out of No Way” (NMAAHC), an alternative fungibility to the absolute fungibility of black bodies as extraction frontier. This “other gravity” might be thought in Tiffany King’s (2016, 1023) analysis of black fungibility as a spatial analytic, where “Black fungibility also functions as a mode of critique and an alternative reading practice that reroutes lines of inquiry around humanist assumptions and aspirations that pull critique toward incorporation into categories like labor(er).” King counters the absolute claim of fungiblity on the black body and its properties, tilting the axis of engagement. She argues that by “theorizing Black bodies as forms of flux or space in process rather than as human producers, stewards and occupiers of space enables at least a momentary reflection upon other kinds of (often forgotten) relationships that Black bodies have to plants, objects, and non-human life forms” (1023).” Ibid. p. 96.