Photography is my thing. 

 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23128732

 

"No Exchange without Likeness"
       For Marx, commodity production depends both on the division of the laborer's body and on a kind of artful bodybuilding that I have argued resembles the kinds of photographic montage produced in the mid-nineteenth century. As Marx writes, commodities are "merely a number of parts fitted together" (Capital 474). The work of commodity fetishism is, to a large extent, the work of composing bodies and body parts into the seductive and smooth contours of attractive merchandise—the work of making a commodity body capable of casting "wooing glances" at consumers (204). The "body of the commodity" is a composition of two apparently heterogeneous groups of objects—natural materials and laboring bodies: "The physical bodies of commodities are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour" (133). Marx defines this labor as an objectified form of the laborer's body, but in the form of severed body parts: a "productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, [and] hands" (134). While the performance of labor seems to divide the body of the worker into dis posable parts, the division of labor performs a primary dismemberment in preparation for this "productive expenditure" of body parts:
    [The division of labor] converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations... Not only is the specialized work distributed among the different individuals, but the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation .. . [It] is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. (481-82) The division of labor makes men into "monsters" in order to collect them and their embodied labor more efficiently. It at once "cripples" a body by transforming a whole body into a single part and multiplies the uses of an individual body by dividing it up into parts, each of which can be used for specialization. While the division of labor seems to mimic the operations of synecdoche, in which a whole body is reduced to a single and representative part (the worker as a "hand," for example), Marx stresses how the division of labor makes it impossible for a body so divided to be represented at all. Parts can only refer to parts, because "the individual himself is divided up." That is, the productive divisions of manufacture seem to make the referential divisions of synecdoche impossible. But as fragments of individual laboring bodies are passed "from hand to hand" (Capital 455) in the process of production, they become inseparable and indistinguishable from the parts of the commodity being assembled: "[A] 11 these membra disjecta come together for the first time in the hand that binds them into one mechanical whole" (462).20 Blurring the distinction between embodied commodities and commodified bodies—between components that look like body parts and body parts that look like components—Marx figures production as a form of artistic and mechanical labor, an artful composition of the "membra disjecta" of labor. Turning imperfect monsters into perfect products becomes the aesthetic labor of commodity fetishism. --pp.131,32

On 9/20/20 11:11 AM, wideangle wrote:

Photography is my thing. 

 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23128732