Revenge Capitalism by Haiven Max;

Author:Haiven, Max;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

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Capitalist anesthetics

Revenge is both the method and the symptom of a form of capitalism that feeds on its own ruination, whether it is the criminalization and hyper-incarceration of those dispossessed by previous waves of capitalist exploitation and extraction or the speculative thriving in the aftermath of disaster.64 The opioid crisis, likewise, was the result of capitalist speculation on the material and spiritual ruination of American racial capitalism.

In her enlightening reading of the final passages in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction,”65 cultural theorist Susan Buck-Morss has convincingly argued that her Marxist predecessor’s concern for the fate of aesthetics under industrial capitalism was not, as is commonly imagined, primarily oriented toward art. Rather, Benjamin had in mind the politics of what Buck-Morss calls the “capitalist sensorium”: the way rapid urbanization, industrialization, and technological change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries both depended on and shaped the transformation of proletarian bodies as sensing, feeling entities.66

She points to the rise of new entertainment technologies, new sonic experiences both artistic (movies, phonographs, radio) and ambient (the din of the factory or city), and the casualized bodily violence of factory work and urban life. These took a slow toll on the laboring body and often enacted swift bodily harm in accidents. She observes that the rise of industrial capitalism was defined not only by new aesthetics in the field of mechanically reproduced culture, but also by the proliferation of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical anesthetics: methods by which proletarians could dull their torqued sensing bodies to survive the accelerating mediatic and haptic violences of capitalism. These include the use of narcotics, but also the narcotizing qualities of mass culture: cheap sentimentality, Manichean narrative closure, bombastic aesthetics, reckless melodrama, and the like. In Benjamin’s other writing, he explores in detail how the complicity of the middle classes in Germany, England, and France was purchased with the hallucinogenic temptations of consumerism in the arcades and later department stores of the growing metropolis: secured spaces of capitalist pleasure walled in from the grime, smoke, poverty, and strife that produced them.

This, for Buck-Morss, is the key to understanding the haunting final lines of Benjamin’s essay, where he meditates on the rise of fascism in his time. Fascism, while doing nothing to alleviate the pain and sensory overload of the proletariat, gives thrilling expression to their suffering, often in the very same media. The hyperbolic participatory spectacles which overwhelm the senses and the maximalist, affectively consuming pageantry of fascism represented the “aestheticization of politics”, not just the transformation of politics into hyper-nationalist spectacle, but a politics calibrated to exploit the fractured, wounded, rewired sensorium of the industrialized, self-anesthetizing proletarian body. Benjamin argued that such a body (and body politic) comes to delight in the spectacle of its own annihilation, eagerly careening toward a self-destructive orgy of violence, the immolation of the individual in the forge of the vengeful mass.

Buck-Morss ends by reiterating Benjamin’s urgent invitation, in the name of the socialism that

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