Ethereal Brutality: Dismembered Capitalism and Material Horror

Recently, I had the pleasure to be interviewed on an excellent podcast with a good comrade and fellow psychoanalytically-inclined social worker called From78. To help contextualize this particular musing on the ideas of horror, dismembered capitalism, and the reemergence of the Gothic/warm strain in Marxism, you can listen to part 1 of that discussion here and part 2 here on Red Library – A Political Education Podcast for Today’s Left. In a dynamic fashion (in the psychoanalytic and therapeutic sense), something  unexpected emerged which demanded a pause to congeal some ideas from the dark ether into a written form. This writing can be firmly situated in the realm of Gothic Marxism while also aiming to further extend it beyond the realm of cultural and social analysis to ground it more deeply in the realm of the material, as well. 

Engine of Dismemberment 

In a long-form piece published  on Capillaries earlier this year, I was deeply haunted by the images in the Ari Aster film, Hereditary. One scene in particular crawled its way into my psyche and took up residence: Peter gazing into the glass in his classroom to see not himself but the horrific spectral representation of his fate and sense of powerlessness over the events of his life. I saw this scene as a beautiful metaphor and material representation of the sense of the uncanny stemming from the terror of the subjective experiences we feel in the modern material and psychological landscape of capitalism, especially in the U.S. We see ourselves and the larger structural conditions we exist in as disembodied, strange specters that resemble us but somehow include something beyond us – something monstrous or ghost-like that haunts us like a remainder or excessive quality we can’t explain. These specters are simultaneously both us and not us at the same time. We try to suture the spectral version of ourselves back onto the material through the commodities we purchase and the ways of relating to each other we become trapped in. My use of a horror film (and the larger tendency on the Left historically to use horror and the Gothic to capture the essence of subjectivity under capitalism whether it is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Leftist podcasts focused on horror films) stem from the same necessity to make the ethereal specter of capital become trapped in a material body again.

A general thesis: the increasing immateriality and disembodied quality of capital’s processes brings a corresponding intensifying of its material effects on a global scale. These ethereal and immaterial processes demand a mediating image or metaphor to make them knowable. The aesthetics of horror and the Gothic are perhaps the most potent and effective means of serving this function which are accessible to the masses in a way few other things are. 

Most political economic analyses of capitalism’s current stage tend to focus on its increasingly abstracted nature. Derivatives, risk analysis of world markets for maximizing profit from investment, the putrid sores of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) in the economic crisis of 2008-9 – all of these are increasingly receding from our day-to-day experiences and become more strange and difficult to comprehend. This is also a result of the increasingly effective way that their functioning is obscured by the rapacious benefactors of these practices like heads of the International Monetary Fund, bankers, Wall Street traders, and their kin. But while the inner workings of an increasingly abstracted global system may be rendered more dark and unknowable with each new development in the realms of capitalist technologies, their effects become more material, concentrated, and violent on the growing masses of people left to rot and pay for an increasingly small number of people who are served by this stage of globalized financial capitalism. As the effects of financial markets become more abstracted and globalized in their ghost-like existence, their effects become more real and devastating on our material experiences of the world and our lives. An obscure, mostly digitized process of financial trades involving unnamed actors in Iceland wielding a type of necromancy of zombified value in the financial markets will destroy entire neighborhoods and lives in Detroit or Taiwan. We cannot help but experience this as the effects of some sort of spectral entity that stalks us and demands some unknown sacrifice. This is not to say that capitalism has not always been global in its processes and effects. But the mediation of those effects is no longer found primarily in the changing weather patterns and geographical limitations which impact trade and market expansion but in the increasingly ethereal realm of finance which global capital cannot exist without and its corresponding international institutions with their priests of the market. These priests of Mammon police the sacred knowledge of capital and bar entry into capital’s house of worship to the masses while it only impoverishes them more completely with every advancement in its ghostly technologies of trade and market volatility.

We will endeavor to roughly describe some material effects of capital through the concept of dismembered capitalism which describes its impact not only on the body and mind of the masses but also describes the current development of capitalism itself as a global spectral force. Our corresponding material analysis of the increasing turn to horror and Gothic imagery and imagining in Marxist and anti-capitalist criticism sees it as a logical effect of dismembered capitalism’s development. The pervasiveness of horror as a way to render capitalism more visible (which is a key component of Gothic Marxism’s approach) to ourselves and others increases with the fall of Soviet Marxist orthodoxy and the re-opening of a space for the Gothic strain of Marxism as capital becomes more spectral and ghost-like in its horrifying processes. 

Our bodies are being torn apart violently but it takes place in a larger, abstracted plane which is not seen but felt. Machines no longer eat limbs and scar our flesh but dismember the psyche and scatter it across the Earth. Our response is what David McNally describes as “body-panic” in his work, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism. McNally describes body-panics as “cultural phenomena endemic to capitalism, part of the phenomenology bourgeois life…but, because liberal ideology typically denies these quotidian horrors, apprehensions of the monstrosities of the market tend to find to find discursive refuge in folklore, literature, video, and film”(italics mine). The rise of the figure of the zombie and the vampire have always been conditioned responses to the bodily and psychological dismemberment process we are thrust into as ritual sacrifices on the capitalist altar of wage labor and the markets but which are denied and disavowed by standard bourgeois liberal expression. We will return to “body-panic” in our discussion on horror as an interpretive realm shortly.

We will start here: capitalism has never homogenized – it has always dismembered. Arguments that the spread of capitalism dissolves everything into air is only half true – it dissolves all into air only to transduce it back into some plastic bile that we can choke ourselves on as we devour it. It dissolves local markets with its glut of cheaply produced commodities arriving from unknown distant lands and terrorize the local population and their capacity to produce. It splits those local communities into starker and more rigid divisions and race, gender, and class to enhance its ability to exploit particular sections of the population made more vulnerable by these divisions (i.e., it has dismembered the idealized wholeness of the community into a loosely connected body of atomized parts defined as wage laborers or the indigenous vampires of capital). The land itself is now dismembered when rice or wheat needed from typically local agricultural production is relocated untold miles away to be produced more cheaply and shipped back to the localized area in an elongated way. Your local internet and cell phone company outsources (i.e., dismembers its own digital service provision to consumers) its customer service reception to a call center in Calcutta which tears apart nature of the service and connects it globally only through the mediation of this ethereal realm created as part of capitalism’s injunction to maximize profit through finding the cheapest possible sources of labor. The production process is torn apart but not completely. Only the sinews and muscles of transportation and communication technologies connecting production and consumption keep the limbs together. The pain of the severing is never quite complete. 

Capitalism thrives and develops through dismembering its own initial carapace in just this way which allows it to function more globally and totally. This dismembering occurs in both the material and the ethereal realms of its existence. It has molted the form it took in the Manchester factories which stimulated the initial vision of Marx and Engels and inspired their shared project of critiquing capitalism. As it has torn apart the factory from the investment aspects of a single firm just as a simplistic example and relocated them across the world from each other. Production, consumption, servicing the consumers of the commodities produced, and the detritus of trash and environmental of effects of that consumption are further and further dismembered and spread to the far reaches of the world. My pants are made in Vietnam, bought by me in the U.S., their value realized for the brand’s corporate home in Spain, eventually breaking down to be donated to a charity organization which will dump them with tons of other used clothes from the U.S. in gargantuan piles in Haiti to be picked through by those living with the brutal repercussions of the backlash to the Haitian Revolution of 1791. To be clear, this is not to say that capitalism has not always engaged in these types of dismembering processes. The terror of slavery and plantation production of cotton or sugar have always been horrifyingly globalized in ways unimaginable to most. Unspeakable pain and brutality was inflicted on those pressed into slavery from across the globe and mostly made to live and die in the Americas so European elites could enjoy the banalities of chocolate and modern textiles while corrupting and bankrupting their own governments over the course of centuries (the devolution of the Spanish Empire is a prime example). However, the novel developments of our age are primarily in the way that communication technology connects the dismembered limbs in new, more potent ways as well as the rise of intellectual labor and service work as primary forms of wage labor in particular sections of the capitalist system which then are incorporated into the larger, spectral body of capital. In these areas where intellectual labor and service work have supplanted material production, the arising of “diseases of despair” such as increasing suicide rates, depression, anxiety, and all the rest of it are simply the transubstantiation of bodily horror during the age of factories in Manchester into the psychological horror of the halogen-lit office space or call center. These developments do not make capitalism’s global terror more humane or progressive but only make its processes and effects more ghost-like and spectral. Now it is just as devastating in the realm of the psyche and dismemberment the mind and soul just as it has always done through its effects of bodily horror.

Let us recapitulate: the nature of capitalism is to become more horrifying and horror-like in its production, circulation, and realization processes. And the process of this horror is one of increasing dismemberment of not just the body but also of the psyche. Capital has evolved out of some larval stage nested in the damp, cool plains of the U.K. in the 17th and 18th centuries to fly across the world in new, strange ways. It functions through cramming as many social distinctions it can find in the regions where it lands into its bloody maw and shits out commodified categories of life and subjectivity to be fed back to us. Perhaps this is something to be processed dialectically, however. It has torn asunder the idea of some prior wholeness of the material body, community, psyche, etc. which has plagued the political mind as long as there has been a myth or philosophical treatise that nostalgically call back to some past era which we can return to. And it offers no accelerated escape into the future either – there is only the deceleration into a catastrophe based on these conditions and tendencies. While some critiques of the “body-panic” of capitalist development may see the response as a tearing apart of traditional practices and forms of life or the failure of bourgeois ideology to incorporate the symptoms of the economic destruction it thrives on, we will invoke the Lacanian concept of the Real to say that capitalism excels at revealing the heart of the crack in things which is not just a crack in knowledge but in the things themselves.. Capitalism in its dismembering processes is itself a type of engine of the Real in the realm of the economy. Its horrific processes thrive, succubus-like, on the inherent fractures in us and the world itself which it most thoroughly reveals in the economic realm through the splitting of things into use value and exchange value. It splits us as subjects in this way and it splits the material world itself which is precisely why all things seem susceptible to being commodified. Capitalism is truly apocalyptic in the biblical sense as that which brings revelation. It is no divine revelation, however. It is one one of horror and that the need we have to consume and commodify the world is driven by the lack we feel at the core of our being. Capitalism is simply the best of all possible systems to function based on this exact lack. But, this also implies that capitalism is not itself whole and without a fracture – it always fails at the attempt to achieve some totalizing of markets and itself as the single global system. Our failure to ever be satisfied by what we consume continually shows the inherent fracture in capitalism itself. And our dissatisfaction over ever being satiated is sustained by capital’s ghostly promise that the next commodity or advancement in pleasure which capitalism could perhaps offer us will finally seal the fracture. But it never comes. There is no end of history and there never will be. Let no system, capitalism or any other, be fooled on this point.

We must also not let ourselves fall into the dream that there is some unified wholeness which we can return prior to the commodification of things. The tendency to reveal the split at the heart of things through the commodity’s split of use value and exchange value in the realm of the economic is only an apocalyptic revealing of the split at the heart of things beyond the realm of value and political economy. All that lies in the past is a dark hole that is always receding. This is why all strategies of returning to some form of non-commodified life or more ethical consumption by us as individuals will never pose a significant challenge to capital’s destruction. It is a horrified turning away from what capitalism reveals about the nature of the Real itself and our own limitations and failures to achieve some sort of static equilibrium as people who have been socialized to consume. This is not to mention that it is a fatal strategy for ourselves and as a collective and all too easily adapted to by the forces of the market. Our desire for a lost wholeness and “ethical consumption” is simply commodified and sold back to us at twice the price by “ethical corporations”.

So where does this leave us in regard to horror and the “body-panic” discussed previously? We experience our minds and bodies torn apart and spread across vast regions through the material processes of capitalism which register as both bodily and psychological horror. It is an uncanny and ethereal experience which is difficult to render visible in a meaningful way despite how physical and material we feel its effect to be. What it requires is some sort of mediating realm which can help call the ghosts back into the flesh so we can see what terrifies and haunts us more clearly. While there may be some hope left that workers in the same brutal factory conditions which still exist in various locations across the globe can achieve this through solidarity in seeing their shared conditions of brutal exploitation and unifying around collective interests, this seems less and less possible for most forms of labor in dismembered capitalism precisely because the different aspects of production in the factory have been torn apart to prevent this very solidarity. In its place, something else begins to function as holding the promise for shared, collective consciousness: the realm of cultural production and aesthetics. This is because these areas are the most common thing we share as a subjective reference point despite our divorced locations in the dismembered body of capitalism today. And in this realm of cultural production and aesthetics, we propose that horror offers the most potent place to find effective mediators between the ethereal realms of capital’s functioning and the material effects we, the masses, feel but cannot see.

The Materiality of Horror

Now, it is time for a small confession: I’ve never been a big fan of horror films. Well, that is perhaps only a half-truth. Certain horror films have impacted the core of my thoughts and emotions  in ways that no other genre have been able to do but they do come rarely, I must admit. The sheer terror and enjoyment of films like The Thing, Alien, Hereditary, or The Mouth of Madness did to me what trauma does to us all: tears open a crack in the world to reveal the fracture at the heart of the material background that allows us the small pleasures of continuing our day to day existence while preserving repetition of the same. Maybe that has always been the radical potential of horror – to reveal the violent underpinnings of large, abstracted systems such as capitalism and to reveal the dismembering violence it levels at the body and mind of its sacrificial victims. We turn to horror because we can see it – it makes visual what is normally the processes of a dismembered, global body functioning and existing in an ethereal plane. Horror pulls the specter back into a material body once more.

Is this not precisely why Mark Fisher and others state that capitalism today is most accurately captured in John Carpenter’s Thing? It is a strange, disembodied viral entity that must take the form of some material host to be seen and understood. And eventually, the paranoia that comes with the uncertainty of who The Thing has become is not just one of those closest to us but also of ourselves despite our own sense of certainty that we in fact are not The Thing. The final scene where Kurt Russell and Keith David sit looking at each other waiting for each other to reveal themselves as truly The Thing terrorizing us and threatening our very existence can be read not just as having certainty of yourself while having the conspiratorial, reactionary suspicion that everyone else is not truly human. It functions most effectively by you, as the viewer, realizing that even those that on the surface appear most certain of their agency and human-ness cannot be known to themselves as being not The Thing. This is why the ambiguity functions in such a beautifully terrifying way in the ending of the film. It is effective because up to this point in the film, the viewer has had certainty that the protagonists (i.e., Russell and David) were in fact human. This is the real horror of the film and its most penetrating ideological message: neither of them can be sure they are not The Thing and we ourselves cannot even be sure about ourselves, either. The Thing is not just the most brilliant horrific image that renders the specter of capital visible but it also most accurately portrays the paranoid anxiety most characteristic of capitalist ideology today. We cannot even be sure that, even in our most authentic experiences of freedom and agency, we are not simply the forms of capitalism as Thing playing out other desires and drives that are not our own but of these disembodied, horrifying entities and forces. And it is certainly no mistake that Russell and David sit, waiting in violent anticipation of the other to be revealed as The Thing that aims to destroy them, as a white man and a black man. Capitalism-as-Thing retreats as a spectral entity into the ethereal plain and leaves us with the material form of the body as a racialized Other (or gendered Other or lower class Other or some combination). This is precisely why the incursion of capitalist development with its blight of wage labor and subordinating all things to the market did not dissolve racial and caste or gender distinctions when British colonialism got its hands around the throats of India and Malaysia – it reinforced and thrived off of them (the story of gender divisions in Malaysia is beautifully described by Aihwa Ong in her book, Spirits of Resistance, on women factory workers in Malaysia). But these processes are so thoroughly complex and immaterial that we struggle to make sense out of the conditions of our lives.

Let us return here to McNally’s work on zombies, vampires, and global capital to further illustrate these points. Marx described capital functioning like a vampire and McNally’s most engrossing chapter relates the connections between Shelley’s Frankenstein and the larger structural dismembering and re-animating of the worker’s body and Soul through submission to the form of wage labor ripping the pre-existing forms of life apart at their seems. The zombie was seen as the persistence of life beyond death in Sub-Saharan Africa as workers were reduced to bare life of subsistence and repetition of work as capitalism creeped like death over the social relations of traditional tribal identities and community. It persists in modern zombie films and the mass unconscious as the fear of the masses being not just dead but more than dead by revealing that the human always had some monstrous thing at its core driving it toward life. They have been reanimated but it is the subjects themselves that persist in zombified existence but the thing in us that persists in a monstrous way (what we described as the Real which reveals itself in the fracture at the core of things themselves) and that is revealed through capitalism’s effectiveness at revealing these very things. However, a historical and globalized perspective on the tendencies of horror as a response to capitalism reveal something quite notable. The Sub-Saharan Africa zombie seemed to have a subversive element of resistance to capitalism while the Westernized zombie seems to only hold the fear that we can ourselves become zombified in the conditions of dismembered capitalism. Perhaps it speaks to our fear that we already have and only exist as a monstrous excess beyond our conception of ourselves as human. This is certainly an effect of this particular stage and location of capitalist development and cannot be generalized across contexts in the same way. However, perhaps other figures can be generalized across broader cultural and historical contexts. The vampire arises as the Gothic embodiment of capital’s process on feeding on the life force of workers themselves to sustain its undead existence. As Slavoj Zizek and McNally have noticed, vampires are not portrayed as being aristocratic or bourgeois elites by happenstance. These examples are simply to illustrate the potency and historical tendency to depict the effects of capitalism’s flight across the Earth most effectively in the aesthetic realm through the figures of horror. What clothes do vampires wear in Sub-Saharan Africa?

“The Gothic world is, in fact, only conceivable as the elimination of sentiment. If vampirism makes our hearts pound, our pulse race, and our breathing come in troubled bursts, this is not because it puts us in contact with objects and persons – others – who affect us, but because it confronts us with an absence of absence – an Other – who threatens to asphyxiate us. And rather than making us more at home in our bodies, rather than anchoring us to bodies conceived as the agents of our intelligence, the makers of sense, vampirism presents us with a bodily double that we can neither make sense of nor recognize as our own.” – Joan Copjec

We can expand on the logic underlying the potency of horror figures by referencing the work of philosopher Mark Johnson. His work focuses on the relationship between bodily experience, metaphors, and the more complex systems of language and signification we use to orient ourselves to our environments. In The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding and The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Johnson explores the way that our perception and basic abstract categories of thought and judgment originate in the way our bodies themselves utilize direction, height, light, and other base perceptions to inform the fundamental building blocks of language. We utilize these building blocks to develop more complex ways we represent the world and ourselves in it symbolically and they persist in a sort of monstrous way in our higher levels of abstraction. While Johnson only hints at the political implications of his explorations, he does indicate that the realm of the aesthetic and the imagination function as a primary mediating realm between our embodied experiences of the world and our most abstract, logical ways of thinking. Similar developments have occurred in the realm of psychology and neurobiology through the attack on the body/mind dichotomy of Descartes as exemplified in the the work of Antonio Dimasio and others. Their experiments have developed a new framework of experience which sees that reason and emotion are part of a dialectical totality in their functioning and not separate, discrete aspects of our subjective experience. However, we must not be seduced by the common tendency to imagine this bridge from the body to speech and language is fully constituted and without its own fractures. It is simply to find the sinews and musculature itself between the lack of the body and the lack at the heart of our language and symbols. The body is wracked by an absence no less than our words never fully capture the things they appear to point toward.

Our leap here is to say that horror has a high degree of potency and effectiveness in describing the effects of capitalism and its corresponding bodily and psychological horror precisely because it serves as an aesthetic mediating bridge between the material effects of ethereal structural processes capital  that are unseen but materially felt. Furthermore, horror is a shared cultural production that can be experienced and understood across regions of dismembered capitalism which creates conditions of shared understanding and potential solidarity due to the accessibility of horror as a mass commodity. However, this is not to say that culture and aesthetics can serve as a substitute for the way that shared material concerns can unify and sharpen collective consciousness as a weapon against capital. We have learned all too well that aesthetic resistance in the realm of art and film more often than not serve as substitutes for a mass political project or as a type of wish fulfillment for those who feel ontologically separate from the poor, exploited masses across the globe which in their dismembered experience appear irreducibly different and unknowable, especially to those radicals of middle and upper class backgrounds. But this does not foreclose the possibilities of the aesthetic and cultural production as sites of dialectical potential which exist precisely because our current conditions offer tragically few ways to experience genuine solidarity and shared, embodied experiences which can serve as a basis for a shared collective consciousness. Perhaps it can do even more than this. What if it can serve to illustrate the material conditions of exploitation and oppression that the spectral processes of capitalism subject us to when the effects of bodily and psychological horror continually excel at destroying the psychic conditions of solidarity and leave us as nothing but zombified, atomized individuals who exist as a mass only in our basic drives to consume and enjoy the same commodities? Make no mistake – some retreat to strategies and tactics of building class consciousness of last century will not be sufficient. There is no return to a simpler past but only a dialectical working through these conditions of bodily and psychological horror.

So how does this reveal the current ideological functioning of horror in Left politics today and our tendency to describe the world in its terms? The emergence of Gothic Marxism so beautifully exemplified by the work of China Mieville, in the general spirit of Salvage Magazine, or in the role of horror films in the emerging Leftist media landscape of podcasts and blogs signal the underlying embodied feeling and logic of horror as an aesthetic mediator most appropriately suited to our current conditions and social relations under dismembered capitalism. However, the tendency of these expressions tend to focus on Gothic Marxism or whatever it may be called as existing primarily in the realm of culture and social with minimal connections to the larger totality of capitalism including the phantasmic functions of economy and politics. If Gothic Marxism wishes to be a form of Marxism with fidelity to the spirit of its namesake, then it will find its strongest expression and analysis through dialectically relating the developments of the Gothic and horror in culture and aesthetics to the larger material structures and ethereal brutality of the system of dismembered capitalism. The realm of horror has already shown itself to be a potent way to render visible the bodily and psychological horror of our lives in a way that can stimulate the type of critical reflection on the sheer terror that capitalism reeks upon us and the world as this ghostly figure that only appears as a disembodied and viral being. It can do this in Kenya or Detroit or South Korea in a way few other things appear to be capable of in our current era and conditions. Let us adopt it fully and seek to make it live up to its name: not just thoroughly Gothic but also thoroughly Marxist through striving to find an embodied analysis of the social relations of capital as well as its haunting, ethereal effects on our minds and bodies. Let us make this global specter material in an appropriately horrifying way.