just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.”1 The political destiny of the commodity (very close, in a way, to Agamben’s apparatus-thing) is, then, to complete its total dominance over social life, over the life of things, but also over somatic life, since its dominance inscribes itself deeply into bodies. Indeed, the commodity dominates not only the world of things, but also the realm of the perceptible, the imperceptible, the sensible and the infra-sensible, the domain of desiring, even the domain of dreams. The commodity governs, and so much so it even governs the very possibility of imagining governance. Moreover, the commodity governs not only subjects, but also the very life of objects, the life of matter—the life of life and the life of things. Under its domain, humans and things find their concrete openness for endless potentiality crushed or substantially diminished. Even if the commodity is a material object, its power is to make sure that things are not left in peace. The incorporeal transformation of a thing into a commodity corresponds to its entrapment within one single destiny: becoming a utilitarian object attached to an economy of excess, linked to a spectacular mode of appearing, firmly demanding “proper use,” bound to capital, and aimed eventually at the trash-bin, preferably within less than six months, when it will become again a mere thing, i.e. valueless matter for capital. So perhaps, the counter-force of objects lies precisely in merely being a thing. 4. The dispossession variation Let’s propose that objects, when freed from utility, from use-value, from exchange-value, and from signification reveal their utter opaqueness, their total capacity to be fugitives from any apparatus of capture. When free, objects should gain another proper name: no longer object, no longer apparatus, no longer commodity, but simply thing. Fred Moten, theorizing on the “resistance of the object” that black radical performance always activates, remarks: “While subjectivity is defined by the subject’s possession of itself and its objects, it is troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert such that the subject seems to be possessed—infused, deformed—by the object it possesses.”2 I call the dispossessive and deformative force always being exerted by any object: thing. Perhaps we need to draw from this force, learn how subjects and objects can become less like subjects and less objects and more thing. 5. The decolonizing variation How can the performative power of things unleash vectors of subjectification away from Agamben’s and Debord’s generalized diagnosis of our contemporary subjectivity and objectivity as existing exclusively under the sign of subjugation and resignation before the imperial force of controlling objects, commodities, or apparatuses? How do we decolonize the violent suturing of objects and subjects under the rabid violence of colonialism, 1
Debord, The Society of Spectacle, 29. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetic of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.
2
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