Unless, like Liz Lemon, I’ve unwittingly stumbled into a fight club, not everyone has lost their mind in championing as a desirable outcome the strange logic of devaluation that undergirds the capitalist world-system, in which the cheaper the commodity, the higher its value.

Fortunately, there are still those like Stephanie Lambert who, in a June 2021 critical essay, “Toxic Waste and Unpaid Labor: Don DeLillo’s Everyday”, confirms the “socioecological violence of the capitalist world system” as something we need to talk about rather than passively accept.

Lambert argues that DeLillo’s texts, “by pushing textual periphery to center…radically critique the value-logic of capitalism”:

His aesthetics of surplus and enumeration are, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate, freighted with the mounting contradictions of the US cycle of accumulation, and the surfaces of the everyday marked by the world-systemic violence that fuels the economic core – and haunted by the bodies and land it devalues, exploits, and toxifies. (Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 67, Issue 2)

Not only does Lambert’s explication of the ways in which surplus depends on devaluation give the conclusion that devaluation is not to be reclaimed as ultimately a good thing, it implies also a capitalist-world system that is proven to work, not by producing wealth in order to overcome poverty for everyone in an overarching and historical sense, but by expanding and perpetuating poverty for the vast majority.

But if contemporary Marxist theorists aim in their work to effect a displacement of the centers of economic power to where the labor is, this only complies too well with what consumers of capitalist production seem to desire anyway, which is a political toothlessness, which is to say not a desire for power but a desire for distance, for permission to cast a blind eye on how capitalism works, and thereby freedom from the conditions out of which consumer objects were produced – to exist independently of these. Against calls to return power to the hands of the people is this apparent mandate to elected officials to maintain this distance from supply side surplus labor. But I would hardly call it a paradisiacal state of innocence to not know (and not want to know) how the Haitians are kept out.

If anything, a properly conceived “pure” innocence or unawareness – such as that in the moments before the animal sees man as naked in the Derridean sense – is the missing element that allows us to make sense of other industrial practices, such as that which authorizes the design of anonymous factory farming that tampers with consumers’ ability to bear witness to means of production while also betraying an all-too-clear awareness that animals themselves are not insensible to their suffering, as well as an awareness that the agent of that suffering can leave a record, a “cosmic thumbprint.”

Perhaps out of desperation, a non-dualist trend as of late has been marked by a turn to chemically induced mind expansion interventions. But this quick fix scheme only reproduces the same unintegrated, malnourished action that capitalist reproduction is so good at accumulating as mere detritus. And, in any case, I would be resistant to mind expansion interventions, too, if I participated in the production and consumption cycle of industrial farming, because I would then have to confront the deeply psychotic nature of practices such as branding and the routine use of electroshock implements on defenseless living beings, where the descriptor ‘defenseless’ is not a sentimental deployment to be laughed at, but objective fact.

On the other hand, if inequality among men consists in habit, not in their birth, then it’s more accurate to say men are ‘created’ by their manner of being in the world and in their manner of approach, including constraints placed on these. The integrated man who lives by his own labor is objectively of a superior quality to the ‘highly functioning,’ ‘compartmentalized’ westernized man. Integration in this sense would be the measure and the proof of one’s manner of being. It would be what gives the last laugh.

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