Anti-Socially Necessary Labour Time
Description
Capitalism’s drive for surplus value is contingent on a set of class relations that get flattened out to produce the category of abstract labour and its index, “socially necessary labour time.” Difference and particularity are subsumed and reposited in capital’s own image and mediated by the symbolic requirements of exchange and commensurability. We understand this movement of abstraction in Marx to be a representational problem for thought.
While the last decade has seen a marked increase in critiques of colonial racial capitalism (Koshy, et al., 2022; Byrd et al., 2018), one of our key aims in this seminar is to think about racial violence and land dispossession—for example—not only as experiential social facts or historical contingencies (Sorentino, 2019; da Silva, 2007). Rather, we’re interested in how the formal categories of Marx’s critique—abstract labour, surplus value, profit, price, exchange etc., —are always already saturated by (anti-)social forms of racial violence and colonial dispossession. In this seminar, we invite elaboration on the anti-social, or the negative of sociality, as both a descriptive category that outlines the constitutive relationship between value and race, and as the real movement toward abolishing the present state of things.
Our organising line of inquiry in this seminar is: if the social for Marx is determined by the necessary temporalities of value production (Postone, 1993), what are the anti-social forms of domination that scaffold its structural integrity? (De’Ath 2018; Vishmidt & Sutherland, 2020)? In particular, how do the categories of race, blackness, Indigeneity, and land put pressure on the central categories of Marx’s value-theory? If value is a social relation, what remains unrepresentable in terms of social necessity?
We welcome papers that engage with these questions through approaches including, but not limited to, the following:
- Figures, tropes, and aesthetic strategies for mapping “universal negativity” of value—its bearers and displacements. (Best, 2024; Chen, 2023; Nealon 2021)
- Black studies’ and Afropessimist approaches to the problem of totality (Nesbitt, 2022; Sorentino, 2023; Sexton, 2011)
- Settler colonialism, land, and “free gifts of nature” (Bhandar, 2018; Coulthard, 2014; Manning, 2023; Park, 2016)
- Third World Marxism and the imperial composition of capital today (Kadri, 2016; Kahlili, 2020; Hanieh, 2024)
- Psychoanalysis, negativity, and the anti-social (Zizek, 1993; Marriott, 2021; Tomšič, 2018).
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
I'm an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wyoming, the ancestral and traditional territories of the Crow, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Shoshone nations. I teach Indigenous Literatures and critical theory, and my research asks how contemporary Indigenous poets register the contradictions of colonial racial capitalism in their work. My current research takes up the social contradiction of colonial treaty relationships in the Great Plains.
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Jeff Diamanti is associate professor of philosophy and cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
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Seb Boersma-Grossmann is PhD student in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His interests include social movements, social reproduction theory, crisis theory, and the critical science fiction of value.
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Current book project: "Reading Is Theft: Literature and the Culture of Property," on reading and dispossession from picaresque to recent fiction. Author of Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory. Essays in Critical Inquiry, ELH, and elsewhere. Assoc Prof of English & American Studies and former director of Certificate in Social, Cultural, & Critical Theory at Wesleyan; founding co-pres of Wesleyan AAUP, 2021-24.
Papers
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I am a PhD Student in Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto.
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Fintan Calpin received his PhD in contemporary poetry and Marxian theory from King's College London last summer. He is an assistant editor at CLCWeb and his first book of poetry, Terminal City, was published by Veer2 last year. He lives in London.
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Ben Read is a PhD student in English and American Literature at NYU interested in the relationship between poetry, social life, and social form. His research focuses on the afterlives of Romanticism in the twentieth century inflected by histories of dispossession and racialization. Ben is from Spokane, Washington, and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Speaker Bio
Sam Nimmrichter is pursuing a PhD in German at Princeton University. His research explores the social mediation of violence and its relationship to the history of sensory perception, with a particular focus on Marxist thought, Black Studies, and Media Theory. Current research interests include representations of crisis in German post-war literature and the relationship of race and value in Marx’s understanding of social form.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ingrid Diran is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and teaching focus on Marxian thought, racial capitalism, biopolitics, and the Environmental Humanities. She is currently at work on a book that theorizes an unrealizable form of value that she calls the invaluable. Her work has appeared in Theory & Event, American Quarterly, and Early American Literature, among other venues.
Speaker Bio
Shama Rangwala is an Associate Professor of Humanities at York University. Her current research examines the adaptations of liberalism and fascism as represented in cultural production.
Speaker Bio
Brent Ryan Bellamy teaches in the Cultural Studies program at Trent University at both undergraduate and graduate level. He has co-edited two collections: An Ecotopian Lexicon and Materialism and the Critique of Energy. His book is Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of US Decline. He is currently working on worldbuilding as a creative, critical, and pedagogical concept.