see-n●thing

To see nothing

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The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities.”

In capitalist society, the sense-perception of seeing is engendered by the commodity-form. Relations between human beings appear as relations between things, and relations between things appear as relations between human beings. The logic of value possesses an opaqueness which discloses nothing about the concreteness and particularity of human inter-course, collapsed into quanta of time. But it is precisely the realness of these appearances which grounds them in the historicity of capitalist society; the appearances are not “false appearances”, but really-real, really-historical appearances. Notably, as John Holloway remarks, the very fact that “we” (as Marx, in the first sentence of Capital) can assert the existence of this phenomena of “appearance” must necessarily mean that there is something unstated which overflows out of these forms of appearance, a “non-appearance”, that remainder which cannot be captured, and in certain world-historic periods is able to actively refuse being captured, by the identity of the appearance, and is therefore a “non-Identity”.

“Appears as” opens, then, a space of hope. We live in a world in which we are confronted with wealth as commodities, or as money, the general equivalent of commodities. The first sentence of Capital, by telling us that this is an appearance, tells us that it is true but also that it is untrue, that there is more to wealth than this, that there is a wealth that pushes beyond this form. If the existence of wealth as commodities indicates a world of alien determination, a world in which it is the value of commodities that determines the way in which the richness of human capacities is developed, then the simple “appears as” draws our attention to the present reality of a pushing towards self-determination (the precondition for the writing of this first sentence).

John Holloway.

Commodity fetishism grounds and intensifies the praxis of “seeing nothing”.

Commodity fetishism is an objective form of social reality stemming from the specific character of labor in a commodity-producing society. “Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange.” As Marx writes, the fetishism of commodities consists in the fact that the social character of labor appears as the objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves. If fetishism were merely a false belief, to “see nothing” would just be a voluntarist individual correction—a simple change of perspective. But because it is an objective social form imposed by capital, the refusal to See becomes a confrontation with the very determination of social existence under capitalism. To “see nothing” of the commodity-form is to attempt to withdraw from, or negate, the social relations that necessarily generate this form of appearance.

In capitalism, the social intercourse between private, independent producers is indirectly established post-facto through the exchange of the products of their labor on the market. Consequently, the social relation between producers, because of the fact that their labors are mutually dependent parts of a social division of labor, necessarily takes the “material shape” [sachliche Gestalt] of a relation between the objects they produce. The concreteness and particularity of their intercourse is progressively stripped by the market until only the abstract, quantitatively comparable value of their products are left (labor-time). This is why the value-form reified is the only possible form in which a society of private, fragmented producers can cohere into a productive society. To see through this form, therefore, is to see the historically specific and perverse social process that makes this reified appearance necessary.

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour-power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

Karl Marx.

As we find in Rubin, the “content” that is obscured by the “form” is the fluctuating, living process of the social division of labor. The market blindly and post-facto regulates this allocation through the anarchic movements of value and price.

If social relations are objectified in the value of things, then to critique this objectified form is to force into view the question of social organization itself. By refusing to perceive sociality only through the completed commodity, one begins to look for—and potentially to construct—direct social association of human capacities. One begins to see the potential for a social fabric woven from conscious collaboration rather than from the impersonal equations of the market. The communist perceives the totality in its historicity, in its contestability as a social form. From this perspective, one sees the entire field of struggle over this very form—the battle between the bourgeoisie’s con-formity and the proletariat’s revolutionary anti-formism.

To see nothing, hence, is to reject this world of appearances and the inhuman, unearthly forms of being which capital forces onto us, onto the richness of human creativity, of that “wealth” which is the remainder and untruth of its commodity-form. To see nothing is to prime oneself to see at all. To see nothing is a critical praxis which makes explicit the exasperated partisan’s vexation against capitalism’s regime of appearances. In this false totality, to see nothing is to see everything.

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