Category Archives: acumulación

Notes about Accumulation(s) I

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The following notes are merely a series of thoughts without any particular order but that later (hopefully) could be part of my dissertation project (a very [till today] basic and naive ideas about accumulation as a general movement of history and specially modernity)

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Accumulation(s) I

In a way, our times could be described as a series of seriated and seriating accumulations. This, of course, not only testifies for capitalism’s endeavour but also for the way the climate catastrophe has heaped in the horizon of history as our further extinction. Yet, to accumulate does not necessarily means to horde valuable items neither to just let catastrophes pile in the horizon of the coming future. In fact, accumulations are closer to disorganized heaps, piles or bodies amassed (and therefore, somewhat to a weird idea of ecology, meaning that even the smallest tossed or dispensed body, would heap somewhere and eventually return to the place where it was thrown away). Etymologically (if this helps to clarify where I’m going), to accumulate is a verb whose first appearance was in the early XIV (1520) century and is composed by two particles, the preposition “ad” (to) and the substantive “cumulus” (a heap). Hence, in the early years of that period commonly called modernity, at the babbling of what centuries later would become a world ordered for capital through capitalism, a direction was forged, and bodies were constantly directed and redirected to it. 

The coincidence between the origins of the word accumulation and the early period (if not the dawn) of modernity signal that history, somehow, could be understood as a way of directing “cumulus” (heaps). It is not only after the works of Ricardo, Adam Smith and later Marx, that accumulation becomes a direction of wealth, for the first and second, and later, for the third, a production of that “ad” that directs the cumulus. When Marx famously described how the whole economic process worked, with the analysis of commodification, fetishization (another word —as accumulation— that was firstly coined in the context of slave trading in the XV-XVI century), capital circulation, value and surplus value, he still found necessary to unveil what started everything. For Marx, it is not that capital is merely understood as a machine, but as something that is triggered, something that needs to be started. Irremediably when understanding the process of accumulation(s) of capital, as Marx puts it, we “turn in a defective circle, out of which we only get by supposing an “original” [primitive]”, an “accumulation that is not the result of capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point”. That starting point, for Marx, “plays in Political Economy the same role that plays the “original sin in theology”. The result of this ironic comparison (and maybe not so ironic) is the famous formulation of the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation: that is the demystifying of an idyllic process of enrichment. From this perspective, the “so-called” primitive accumulation is the systematic repetition of violence, land dispossession, forced migration, law prosecution and bloody legislations necessary to produce an ambivalent subject that both surrenders to the “ad” of accumulation while also seeks for its “cumulation” in a line of flight: the vogelfrei. 

If the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation is needed at every stage of capitalism, where would the “ad” this time be produced when there won’t be no earth to live? Would it be that at best the feverish science fiction fantasies finally have been conquered (as depicted in movies like Ad Astra [after all, another movie about the possibility of starting a new process of accumulation in space)? As much as these questions are necessary, perhaps it should also be thought the possibility of an accumulation without “ad”, or an accumulation without “ad” or “cumulus” but another form of piling. Even more, perhaps that’s the only cynical comfort we have, that of which today accumulation is collapsing, and we are just hoarding history, as new vogelfrei we are tied to our impossibility towards the future and yet with the possibility of take off in a line of flight.

Notes on Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

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At the end of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) it is stated, as many times in the book, what a possible definition of postmodernism might be: “The postmodern may well in that sense be little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being restructured on a global scale, including the older forms of labor and its traditional organizational institutions and concepts” (417). From this perspective, postmodernism is also a form of interregnum, since both share a level of uncertainty, at least when it comes to naming what or who is the new ruling name in town. In a way, Jameson’s book offers a continuation of what the Political Unconscious inaugurated, that is, a task of constantly historizing. Not surprisingly, this is precisely what Jameson states in the “Introduction”, since he writes thinking for an age that has forgotten how to think historically (ix). The task, then, for a postmodernism thinking is to realize how much of the past has persisted while at the same time acknowledging that commodity critique became another form of mere consumption. This means, of course, that the ultimate form of capitalism (Jameson’s post-industrial capitalism, aka, third stage of capitalism) is able to melt in the everything, that critique is just another object of consumption in a pure form, since “postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process” (x). 

As much as the book seeks to theorize, or, at best, illustrate, what postmodernism might be, it also constantly returns to modernism. If postmodernism is supposed to be understood via historicity, there is no other way than learning the past of that form that could be anywhere. This means that since postmodernism is a “cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features” (4), it hardly is foreseeable whilst also it is always present. Modernism, as an aesthetic form and content, might have challenged the ways and means of production, in the other hand, postmodernism emerges as a form of production that integrates into commodity production the aesthetic. It could be said then that postmodernism is (third stage) capitalism’s craving for the past, present and future, without clearly being able to produce its own historicity. 

Postmodern products (novels, films, buildings and so on) resist interpretation. For instance, about the postmodern novel, Jameson would say that it not only resists interpretation but that it “is organized systematically and formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it perpetually holds on and withdraws” (23). Without, saying it, Jameson’s suggests that the postmodern is a discourse constantly hesitating, something that needs to cut with the old while sustaining it. Postmodern, in its own expression, has a level of undecidability —as much as Jameson refuses to use the deconstructive term (Cfr. Chp. 7). What is at stake when analyzing postmodern art, is not only its form but the way it also depicts the mode of production that produced it, namely a machine that is obsessed with the process of processes of reproduction. Art no longer holds together a monumental enterprise (if it ever did) but now it “reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts […] in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate hits of other texts” (96). Postmodernism ultimately is the addition of dispersed elements, a summatory of things that are distant in time and yet close to our senses. Living in postmodernism times is living distracted, eternally gone in-between the “wrapping shells” of non-centered spaces that demand our centrality and linearity as subjects of production-distribution-consumption. 

While it could be argued that Jameson too easily totalizes the production of culture in the late capitalism, it could also be said that this is not the project of postmodernism, or at least not the postmodernism that Jameson’s proposes. Jameson is aware that he must avoid auto-reification: “Permanent revolution in intellectual life and culture means both that impossibility and the necessity for a constant reinvention of precautions against what my tradition calls conceptual reification” (401). To this extend, thinking about postmodernism might, at best, open the possibility of reading literature (and history) as a series of movements and strategies. Thus, against reifying postmodernism, it should be thought beyond it. That is, if modernism was the movement and formation of monuments and its attractive force; postmodernism would come to be as an affective movement that brakes and disperses while sustaining what cuts. It might be said, then, that our current times (or even after the 60’s which are the times that Jameson analyzes the most), could be catalogued as a suspension and (another) regression (and return), from the brake of the postmodern and the fascination of the modern. We are not living the times of the “effacement of the traces of production” (314), as in postmodernism times we certainly did, but the times were scars are too visible, when what is effaced still accumulates, when non-subjects still matter and the global suspends the monad. And yet, the suspension (or stasis) of our times replicates more than nothing all that past that was supposed to be meted in the air, but somehow found us via partial summing ups.

Mitad del cuento, atisbo otro. Notas sobre La cena (2006) de César Aira

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La cena (2006) de César Aira pudiera ser corolario de otra de sus novelas. Mientras esto no sorprende, pues lo mismo se podría decir de buena parte de la obra de Aira, sí lo hace el tono sombrío y lacónico del relato. La cena cuenta la historia de un narrador deprimido, lleva ya siete años sin trabajo y se ha mudado al departamento de su madre en Pringles. Aunque la madre no hace sino amarlo, el narrador se siente fracasado. Así que, a miedo de dejar pasar su última oportunidad de alcanzar el éxito, el narrador lleva a su madre a cenar a casa de su único amigo, un tipo solitario pero sociable. Luego de la cena y de que madre y anfitrión entablaran una amable conversación, pues ambos tenían algo en común —la “pasión por los nombres” (pos. 6118)—, el amigo del narrador alarga la velada y les muestra a sus huéspedes una serie de juguetes viejos. La madre del narrador no soporta la exhibición, y es que madre y amigo “sólo se entendían cuando pronunciaban nombres (apellidos) del pueblo; en todo lo demás, ella se retraía enérgicamente” (pos. 6228). Después, el narrador regresa a casa con su madre y se pone a ver por la televisión un programa en vivo en el que se da seguimiento a un evento terrorífico local: cadáveres que se levantan de sus tumbas para succionar las endorfinas del cerebro de los habitantes del pueblo. La desgracia, que no logra sacar al narrador de su depresión y pasmo, dura poco. Finalmente, el narrador, al visitar al día siguiente a su amigo para proponerle formalmente su idea de negocios, se da cuenta de que la desgracia televisada no fue sino un “mal” programa de televisión, un refrito que ahora recibe los elocuentes comentarios de su amigo, para quien ese negocio televisivo debe cambiar, pues “la prosa de los negocios tiene que expresarse en la poesía de la vida” (pos. 7157). 

Mientras que la narración del programa de televisión concentra la mayor parte del relato, el meollo (o uno de los meollos) de la narrativa es la depresión del narrador y su fascinación por los juguetes antiguos que su amigo le mostrara el día de la cena. El narrador queda maravillado cuando ve el primer juguete de su anfitrión. “Era un verdadero milagro de la mecánica de precisión, si se tiene en cuenta que esas manitos de porcelana articulada no medían más de cinco milímetros” (pos. 6202). En cierto sentido, el juguete, como tantos objetos en la obra de Aira tiene un carácter atuorreferencial respecto a la novela en sí. Es decir, como el amigo guarda un montón de objetos inútiles pero “milagros de una mecánica precisa”, así también el mercado literario guarda las novelas de César Aira, obras de precisión milagrosa, pero que a los ojos de otros observadores, como los de la madre del narrador, no son más que objetos inútiles y chatarras, juegos de niños. Los juguetes, como las novelas del autor del relato, son objetos que se presentan en forma precisa y pura, hasta que uno empieza a ver que sucede otra cosa. A cambios de velocidad y fuerza la forma se expresa. Cuando el juguete en cuestión, el de las miguitas imaginarias, termina su funcionamiento, el narrador observa que tal vez “Los autores del juguete debían de haber querido significar la cercanía de la muerte de la anciana. Lo que me hizo pensar que toda la escena estaba representando una historia; hasta ese momento me había limitado a admirar el arte prodigioso de la máquina, sin preguntarme por su significado” (6206). El asunto es que ni la madre ni el anfitrión se esfuerzan en entender la “narración” del juguete, para la primera es una pérdida de tiempo y para el segundo es sólo un derroche de forma. 

El enredo que se teje entre las perspectivas del narrador, su madre y su amigo pone a unos en concordancia y a otros en discordia. La concordancia no puede englobar a las tres partes. Mientras que el amigo y la madre viven fascinados por los nombres (apellidos) que saben, el narrador no comparte esta emoción. Igualmente, a la vez que el narrador y el amigo tienen una fascinación similar por los juguetes y demás objetos lujosos —pero inútiles—, la madre del narrador no puede verle nada de especial a esos cachivaches. Aunado a esto, el narrador queda fuera de cualquier lugar de concordancia, pues ni los remedios del amigo (reformar la forma en que la televisión en Pringles trabaja, para expresar “la prosa de los negocios tiene que expresarse en la poesía de la vida” [pos. [7157]), ni las desconfianzas y preocupaciones de la madre sobre el futuro de su hijo, lo sacan del pasmo y tedio en el que vive.

Si a la mesa de una cena se sentaran arte, estado y mercado, éste último, al menos para nuestros días, sería el anfitrión. Mientras estado y mercado se atragantan de nombres para verificar sus narraciones, el arte no hace sino ver que, como el narrador al escuchar las razones por las que su madre desconfía de su amigo, “los nombres hacían verosímil la historia, aunque sobre mí provocaban más efecto de admiración que de verificación” (6347). El arte puede ver la verdad, pero no verificarla. No es su “deber”, pues la verificación y —en cierto sentido también— la verosimilitud pertenecen a un tiempo muerto, como el de la televisión y el programa que registra la catástrofe de los muertos vivientes y su resolución. Si al día siguiente de la cena, el estado, como la madre, queda con el estómago revuelto, y el mercado con las últimas palabras que no rehabilitan al arte, entonces, no habría más que la estetización de la máquina y el sistema como triunfo de un totalitarismo que sabe del pésimo, pero eficiente, funcionamiento de las viejas formas de narrar la vida cotidiana (como el programa sobre los muertos vivientes). No obstante, si la última palabra la tiene el mercado, su prosa de negocios no es más que una narración mal contada, pues como al amigo del narrador, al mercado “se le mezclaban los episodios, dejaba efectos sin causa, causas sin efecto, se salteaba partes importantes, dejaba un cuento por la mitad” (pos. 6076). En esa mitad que se abre al final de las últimas palabras del mercado, la poesía de la expresión abre camino para otra vida y su trabajo.