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Rob Wilkie — Capitalism's Posthuman Empire

In order to consider the social realities of capital's posthuman empire, however, I believe it is necessary to start outside of it, in what Marx and Engels call the "real ground of history…the material production of life itself" (The German Ideology 164). What I mean by this is that in contrast to Giorgio Agamben's posthumanist declaration in What is an Apparatus? that "what is to be at stake, to be precise, is not an erasure or an overcoming, but rather a dissemination that pushes to the extreme the masquerade that has always accompanied every personal identity" (13), the apparent fluidity of the concept of "identity" and "otherness" in social, philosophic, and scientific discourses over time is governed by what Marx and Engels describe as the "mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development" (The German Ideology 165). In starting outside of epistemology, in the historical and material ontology of social relations, it becomes possible to not only document the fact that theories of "self" and "other" change, but why changes in the meaning of identity reflect the deeper social contestations between classes over the material conditions that shape one's life; namely, the life-activity of human labor.

It is on these terms, for instance, that Hegel's foundational theory of otherness in The Phenomenology of the Mind that underlies virtually all cultural theories of difference today can be understood not as the spontaneous coming to "self-consciousness" of the contingent nature of all identity, but rather as a reflection of the changing economic relations of an emerging industrial capitalism which, in turn, turns these economic relations into the illusion of the natural condition of all "life." According to Hegel, "self-consciousness" occurs when society reaches the point at which it can reflect on itself by understanding that individuals exist relationally, but nonetheless independently. "Self-consciousness," he writes, "exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or 'recognized'" (561). It is on these terms that Hegel proposes that the dependent nature of human consciousness up to that point—manifest in the relation between lord and bondsman—is only transformed when each recognizes the other as an equal and independent being.

However, by drawing upon what Marx theorizes as the "material conditions of life," it becomes clear that what Hegel represents as "self-consciousness" cannot be understood outside of the historical and material conditions in which his inquiry takes place. That is, in seeking to define the relational basis of the self as other than the dependent relation between the bondsman to the lord (563), Hegel is challenging the "self" as understood under feudal economic relations and, in its place, establishing the ideological framework for the "liberty" of private property relations under capitalism. It is on this basis, for instance, that Marx writes that the form of "liberty as a right of man" which Hegel privileges is "not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man" (On The Jewish Question 42). In other words, the need to recast humanity as a social relation based upon the "recognition" of equals is driven by the emergence of a society framed around both the contractual meeting of "free" individuals in the marketplace—that is, individuals "freed" from the means of production and thus forced to sell their labor power for a wage—as well as the rethinking of the bourgeois "individual" as having a natural "right" to freely own private property.

To return, then, to the contemporary moment of posthumanism, the reading of identity which has come to dominate cultural theory responds to the globalization of wage-labor by arguing that the primary struggle is no longer between classes, but between the cultural homogenization of the social, on the one hand, and the post-race, post-class, and post-gender multitudes which "resist" through appeals to cultural singularity and local difference, on the other. Perhaps the most prominent proponents of this thesis are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who, in Commonwealth, argue that although "War, suffering, misery, and exploitation increasingly characterize our globalizing world… [o]ne primary effect of globalization… is the creation of a common world, a world that, for better or worse, we all share, a world that has no 'outside'" (vii). At the core of their thesis is that capitalism is no longer a system divided by class, but rather a system of political domination that, however unevenly, nonetheless impacts and pulls everyone into a struggle over control over definitions of "self." In the new, "common" world, they write, "each identity is divided internally by others: racial hierarchies divide genders and classes, gender hierarchies divide races and classes, and so forth" (340) and "no one domain or social antagonism is prior to the others" (342). In this sense, the struggle for social change is not about ending the conditions of class exploitation that lead to racial and other forms of oppression, but rather expanding the recognition of independent identities such that they can no longer be subsumed under the homogeneity of capitalism's instrumental and reductive logic. In this post-race, post-class, and post-gender world, they declare, recognizing the "Singularity" of the multitudes "destroys the logic of property" (339) and "fills the traditional role of… the abolition of the state" (333). As such, their proposal is to abandon any hope of fundamental social transformation or alternative to capitalism in favor of "an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire" (vii).

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