Cartographies of the Absolute by Jeff Kinkle

Author:Jeff Kinkle [Kinkle, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2015-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

The route of all evil

What does it mean, after all, to represent capitalism in such a way that it could be available for critique? As already indicated, several recent films have tried to rend the veil of contemporary capitalism. What is symptomatic is that in so many of them the passage from the social relations between things to the relations between people takes the guise of fantasies of conspiracy. In films like Michael Clayton (2007), which is emblematic of this trend, it’s as though the incapacity to tackle the role of abstract domination and systemic violence in capitalism (its structural ‘evil’) leads to projecting real scenes of violence and sinister plots (a kind of diabolical evil) at its core. Fetishism is countered by fantasy, as though the absence of malicious agency in a machine that wreaks such violence (in Michael Clayton in the guise of environmental crime) were itself too disturbing to contemplate. It could be argued that capital is so signally absent from the American political imaginary because it is so often represented, in the guise of the corporation (invariably shadowed by the legal firm). The inexorable logic of capital is thus overshadowed by the personal failings of a few greedy, criminal bad apples. This individualisation of malign bearers (Marx’s Träger) always retains the possibility that the whole might be immune to reproach or open to reform. Despite several similarities with films like Michael Clayton, in a The International, we have seen, the opposite is the case. There, it is essentially capitalism that is the problem and the evil banker is but a cog in the machine, admitting as much when he pleads for his life in the film’s finale. For the most part, however, capital’s criminal causalities, end up, in Jameson’s characterisation of the poor man’s cognitive mapping slipping ‘into sheer theme and content’.292 In a sense The Wire, with its refrain that ‘it’s just business,’ reverses depictions of American capital that find some kind of diabolical, criminal evil at the core of their intrigue. Instead, we get the harsh complexities and unavoidable compulsions of the cash nexus and its associated organizational infrastructures: the universal ‘institutional and systemic corruptions’ of national life in America.293 The economy of crime is never hygienically sundered from the crimes of the economy. Or, to borrow Vincenzo Ruggiero’s lapidary formulation: ‘the economic order contains, ab initio, the criminal order’.294 This connection is made explicit by Simon when in an interview he claims that ‘the Greek’, probably the show’s highest-ranking criminal, ‘represented capitalism in its purest form’295 – a curious claim this, as the Greek’s impassive Old World malignity, leavened by an ‘ethnic’ attachment to family and custom, presents a very unlikely stand-in for ‘pure’, which is to say abstract capitalism.

The Wire responds to this critical and aesthetic conundrum of how to depict capital in a number of ways. By mediating the impact of urbanised neoliberal or post-Fordist capitalism through its domains of dispossession and the institutions that convey or vainly try to resist

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