Doug Eacho

@dougeacho.bsky.social

1722 Followers 1426 Following

asst prof of theatre and performance studies at the national university of singapore. 🇺🇸/🇨🇦. writing a book about automating theatre (surrealism, cybernetics, backstage tech, ai) in which i discover to much astonishment that it was capital all along.

An article on the new Nepali government recalls the use of the One Piece flag by 2025 protesters but calls it "the pirate flag that is a worldwide symbol of Gen Z resistance"
Cover of Jay Taylor's "The Generalissimo: Chaing Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China."
L, photo of French poet Raymond Roussel; R, a quote from Beverley Best, "What is hidden is not simply the role of living labour in production but, rather, the mediation by the entire production process itself in capital's expansion. What disappears in the circuit of interest-bearing capital is the role of mediation itself."
Scene from Mishima Yukio's "Primary Colors" (1955), a one-act about a bisexual mènage á trois. extremely fascy.
As Marx establishes in the opening chapters of Capital, there is good reason for this. The central contradiction of capitalism lies between a market in which goods trade for their equivalents, and a market in which capital accumulates through the exploitation of workers. But because the trade of labor for a wage is actually an equivalent market exchange—the wage represents the worker’s own market position, not the value of their bodily activity—both sides of this contradiction are true.59 Free and fair markets exist, and in them, capital accumulates, thanks to unpaid surplus labor. (Marx, ironic but not sarcastic, said, “The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor￾power foes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man.”)60 To hope for an eternal steady-state equivalent exchange without growth, as Schneider does, attempts to sever the market away from capital. But both constitutively depend on one another. The realm of the commodity, of fairness, of circulation, cannot be severed from the hidden abode of production. As Theodor Adorno puts it in Negative Dialectics, amidst his critique of “identitarian thinking,” “barter as a process has real objectivity and is objectively untrue at the same time, transgressing against its own principle, the principle of equality. This is why, of necessity, it will create a false consciousness: the idols of the market.”61 The market’s equivalence of values is false, and also, real. It is no wonder we idolize a version of it shorn of the contradictions we live within.
This is the market theory of performance. It proposes performance as a utopian place of equal recognition, transactional flow, and preserved value. On this market, labor is present with labor, all consistently preserved across social and temporal division. Performance is “like currency” in that it lets this labor’s products pass from hand to hand without distortion, in that it preserves its being until used again (which is to say in our current inflationary period, not much like currency at all). Performance overcomes mediation in the way that a purchase “overcomes” exploitation. A buyer and seller agree that a price is fair and equate various sorts of labor as abstractly identical. A spectator and performer agree on the identity of a performance, ever the same as it was; they agree on the commonality of their affective experiences; they communicate their intermedial messages to and fro. Bodily actions recur across performers’ repertoires and across spectators’ feedback loops: work = consumption, consumption = work. On this theory, the implicit promise of the liveness thesis is realized at grander scale. Your activity really can be recognized, repeated, and repaid, at any distance.