Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination (original) (raw)

human labor, though they differ in the ways in which they foreground their embodiment of abstract labor. As Marx argues, “The body of the commodity, which serves as the equivalent, always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour, and is always the product of some specific useful and concrete labour.”106 While they are visual equivalents within the diegesis of the film, the abstract labor congealed in the “bodies” of the digital and analog images are founded on very differ-­‐ ent forms of concrete labor. The bodies of the Spartan warriors depicted in film can be conceptualized as a form of ab-­‐ stract human labor rooted in the concrete labor of physical/bodily exertion. Each Spartan body rep-­‐ resents not only the work, suffering, sacrifice, and dedication needed to create it, but also, by proxy, the work, suffering, sacrifice, and dedication of the entire Spartan army. The Spartan army is a sin-­‐ gle unit, fighting together in a phalanx and relying on each other to surv...

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