The Abstraction of Labour as a Cultural Technique? (original) (raw)

In Capital, Marx argues that his greatest discovery was the “dual character of labour embodied in commodities” (1976:131). If the commodity has a dual character of use-value and value, then the labour producing the commodity must also have a two-fold character, which Marx conceptualizes as concrete and abstract. While concrete labour produces the use-value of the commodity, such as programming producing software, programming creates value insofar it is labour abstracted from its concrete manifestation. Abstract labour is the substance of value. This abstraction is a process that occurs during the moment of exchange when two qualitatively different commodities are equated quantitatively as values and measured in terms of labour-time. Exchange “consummates the abstraction that underlies abstract labour” (Heinrich 2012:50). The abstraction of labour, however, is not a mental abstraction, but a real one that is “carried out in the actual behavior of humans” (Heinrich 2012:49). Because the abstraction of labour is a human behaviour, this action can be thought of as a cultural technique. Among other things, cultural techniques are “material practices that sustain and enable ‘culture’” (Parikka 2013:4); they process cultural boundaries, such as subject/object (Siegert 2011); and “bring forth a certain kind of subject and… society” through processes of learning and routinizing (Geoghegan 2013:12). Marx initially describes the abstraction of labour as ‘the changing of hands’ of commodities and money, but specifies it as the practices of buying and selling. Thus the technique includes the payment for and transfer of private property, which today occurs through the punching in of a pin number after swiping or inserting a credit card into a payment terminal. These sophisticated payment systems are themselves products of the abstraction of labour and points to how the abstraction of labour is an activity that is continually learned and routinized. This paper will explore the abstraction of labour as a cultural technique, and argue that this activity is the dominant cultural technique of the capitalist mode of production. It will examine how this cultural technique sustains and enables value; how it processes the internal contradiction between value and use-value into the external opposition between money and commodities; and how exchanging is an activity that must be learned, routinized and habituated.. Bibliography Marx, K. (1976). Capital Vol. 1. London: Penguin Press. Geoghegan, B. D. (2013). After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of recent German Media Theory. Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 30 (6):66-82. Heinrich, M. (2012). An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Parikka, J. (2013). Afterword: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies. Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 30 (6):147-159. Siegert, B. (2013). Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory. Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 30 (6):48-65.