Living Labor, History and the Signifier

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Living Labour, History and The Signifier: Bare Life and

Sovereignty in Eltit's Mano De ObraPatrick Dove

Online Publication Date: 01 March 2006

To cite this Article: Dove, Patrick (2006) 'Living Labour, History and The Signifier:

Bare Life and Sovereignty in Eltit's Mano De Obra', Journal of Latin American

Cultural Studies, 15:1, 77 - 91

To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13569320600597023

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Patrick Dove

LIVING LABOUR, HISTORY AND THE

SIGNIFIER: BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGNTY

IN ELTIT’S MANO DE OBRA

Theword wounds and pierces me, opening a breach in my kidney. (Eltit, 2002, p. 23)

This paper is part of a work in progress that examines literary aesthetics in theSouthern Cone today, both in the wake of military dictatorship and in view of thetendential triumph of neoliberalism throughout the hemisphere. This project asks what isleft of the literary – and what becomes of it – if and when ‘culture’ ceases to represent apedagogical instrument of the state. This question in turn necessitates a re-examinationof the status of the political concept of ‘sovereignty’ today. In the time of tendentiallyaccomplished globalization, does the market come to provide the fundamental coordinatesfor the political task of decision-making, substituting its own criteria (debtor/creditor)for the old political distinctions proper to the relation between states (friend/enemy)?Or would a situation in which the market constitutes the sine qua non for any politicsin fact require an even more profound rethinking of the very concept of sovereignty?

In the first part of this paper I develop some connections between GiorgioAgamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ as it appears it in Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life(1998) and Marx’s discussion of labour and commodity exchange in the first volume of Capital . In the second part, I turn to Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra (2002), a literaryreflection on Chilean post-dictatorship. In bringing together these disparate texts andperspectives, I am interested in considering two ways of approaching the problem of sovereignty. One approach calls attention to the ongoing destabilization of traditionaldistinctions between the political and the economic spheres, and suggests that theconcept of the sovereign decision – which Carl Schmitt described as the essenceof the political – must more than ever take into account what used to be regardedas ‘non-political’ forces. The other strategy, meanwhile, approaches the questionof sovereignty from an entirely different perspective, exploring the double role of

language – as that which secures the sovereign order, and as causing it to tremble. Intreating sovereignty as a literary problem, Eltit sheds new light on ethical and politicalproblems arising in post-dictatorship Chile. At the same time, the ‘translation’ of apolitical concern into literary terms exposes the contingent status of what we ordinarilyregard as the stable and natural ground of the social order. In touching on a thoughtof groundlessness at the heart of the state, Eltit’s text also opens onto a differentthought of the political: as the uncertain and incalculable possibility of somethingunprecedented happening in the world.

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 March 2006, pp. 77-91

ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13569320600597023


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This two-sided approach to the question of sovereignty does not manage to freeitself entirely from complications. While these two perspectives are equally necessarytoday, they nonetheless fail to form a single, consistent narrative thread. This‘dialogue’ between the economic, the political and the literary remains fraught withtension, mistrust and the risk of misunderstanding. This may be both its weakness andits greatest strength – that is, its refusal to become part of any new consensus.

Bare life, the political and the crisis of sovereignty

In Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben argues that the originof the political in the Western tradition is found in the separation of what the Greeks

called bios, or determinate forms of human life, from zoé, or the simple fact of life thatis common to humans, animals and gods. For the classical tradition, politics receives itsbearings from the sovereign decision understood as the absolute basis of all politicaldesignations and distinctions. As unmediated origin, the sovereign decision isontologically prior to the emergence of political and legal order, which is to say that itcannot be held accountable according to the terms of the order to which it gives rise.The seeming contradiction of a sovereign who transgresses his or her own law, doingprecisely what others are barred from doing, is in fact not a contradiction at all butrather the very essence of sovereignty. The sovereign decision cannot be grounded(justified, legitimized or rationalized) through recourse to some higher order of intelligibility. Paradoxically, it both suspends the law and institutes it at the same time.The temporality of any given order thus presupposes a time before the time of legality,

an instant when both inclusion and exclusion, or institution and suspension, arerigorously indistinguishable.

In contrast to the classical concept of sovereignty, Agamben argues that the pasttwo centuries have been characterized by a profound techno-scientifically driventransformation of the role of the state, and that today it is no longer possible to say thatthe political defines itself in relation to what it is not (the old bios/zoé distinction).Beginning in the nineteenth century, political power no longer treats bare life assomething alien to its domain, but increasingly regards it as a surplus whoseappropriation serves to revitalize the political.1

Agamben’s analysis of this transformation owes a good deal to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, and to his corresponding account of the new configurations of power thatemerge with the transition from the old ‘territorial state’ of the monarch to the

modern ‘state of population’. For Foucault, the political relations that attain with themodern state cannot be understood as a function of any single source (e.g.governmental institutions, officials, etc.), but instead represent a diffuse proliferationthrough daily and unremarkable practices. Via disciplinary practices, state powerconstrues, addresses and tends to its subjects as both living beings (zoé) and as membersof a population. Whereas monarchical power expressed itself in the sovereign’s right todecide over the life or death of a subject – and it thereby made no lasting claim oneveryday life as such – biopolitical power is configured by the myriad of inconspicuousways in which the state assumes the task of caring for biological life itself, administeringover the conduct of living and of the living.

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For the past two centuries, Agamben argues, the modern state form has beensustained by repeated instances of redrawing the line between what is and what is notpolitical, and by new encroachments on domains previously considered to lie beyondits purview. But since any redrawing of the boundaries between the political and barelife necessarily entails the suspension of the order one is seeking to define, thistendency cannot leave unaffected the conceptual status of sovereignty. If Agamben iscorrect in asserting that the infringement of the political on bare life is increasinglyubiquitous today – if in our time the sovereign exception or state of emergency ismore and more becoming the rule – this can only mean that the concept of sovereigntyhas itself entered into crisis. And so, while he follows Foucault’s analysis of biopoliticsup to a certain point, Agamben also asserts that this modern reconfigurationnecessitates a radical rethinking of the foundational concept of sovereignty.2

In so far as modern emancipatory projects work to expand and secure the rights of individuals and groups in the eyes of the state, these endeavours share more than theywould care to acknowledge with new forms of subjugation and domination. To thedegree that a political demand for rights presupposes sovereignty and politicalrepresentation as necessary conditions for democratic politics, the signifiers ‘freedom’and ‘liberty’ remain potential conduits for state power. Agamben characterizes thisparadoxical crossing between emancipation and domination as the continual redrawingof the distinction between the political and bare life. No border could ever be sufficientto guarantee and satisfy modern political order: on the contrary, sovereign power canonly sustain itself through infinite expansion, by repeatedly suspending and redrawingthe line. Apart from its existence at the limit, sovereignty is nothing.

One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics . . .

is its constant need toredefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside fromwhat is outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more andmore deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty – nonpolitical life – isimmediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn. Once zoé ispoliticized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make itpossible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And when natural life iswholly included in the polis – and this much has, by now, already happened – these thresholds pass . . . beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death inorder to identify a new dead man, a new sacred man. (Agamben, 1998: 131)

To the extent that Agamben actually theorizes the notion of bare life in Homo Sacer , its

conceptual status proves to be paradoxical. On one hand, Agamben offers a dialecticalapproach to ‘bare life’: the biopolitical body is produced by the sovereign decision; it isconstituted and identified as that which is to be cared for and administered by the state.We therefore miss the point if we imagine bare life or the ‘non-political’ as anunmediated presence that precedes political power and only subsequently suffers itsincursions. Bare life is never simply ‘outside’ the political; it has always already beenmapped and calculated by the sovereign decision. At the same time, however,Agamben also describes bare life as the secret source that animates political power andgives it sense. From this second perspective, which positions itself at the limit of thedialectic, bare life would seem to name an unrepresentable excess in relation to thesovereign decision, a part that escapes the delineation of the whole (into that which is

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and that which is not political). In what follows, I will suggest that this paradoxicalsense in which bare life is both the product of sovereign power and its excess isstrikingly similar to the way in which Marx describes ‘living labor’ as both aconsequence of separation and as resistance to separation.

Production of the subject: labour, exchange and value

Marx’s discussion of commodity production and exchange in the first volume of Capital has a good deal in common with Agamben’s account of the simultaneous exclusion andcapture of bare life. But if Agamben’s thesis announces both the omnipresence of sovereignty and its imminent end as a political concept, it could be argued that the

exposure of this concept to another sphere – such as the economic – might wellrepresent a necessary interpretive step. In what follows, I will focus on the‘Commodity’ chapter of Capital . I will not delve into all of the problems that Marx’stext points out with regard to commodity exchange, but will limit myself tosummarizing what leads Marx to the notion of abstract human labour, from which I willdraw some links to Agamben’s argument. If Capital has something to say in the contextof Agamben’s argument, it is because Marx’s analysis of economic relations isfundamentally concerned with the role played by production in the organization of social relations.

The ‘Commodity’ chapter begins by clarifying the strictly formal nature of its object.A commodity is defined as any object that satisfies human needs ‘of whatever kind’, whichis to say that it is indifferent to the object’s characteristics (colour, texture, taste, etc.), the

need which the consumer seeks to satisfy, as well as to the particular form that satisfactiontakes (Marx, 1977, Vol. I: 125). Exchange value cannot depend on anything immanent tothe object, since value determinations require the total abstraction of the particularsinvolved (as Marx reminds us, only unlike things can be exchanged). Nonetheless,exchange does require that we establish an equivalence between the objects to beexchanged, and this – as with any relation – means introducing a third term that must bepostulated as equally present in each. The third term of exchange, the ‘like’ that two‘unlikes’ will be said to share, can only reflect the specific quantity of labour required forthe production of a specific commodity form:

If we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labor. But even the product of labor has already been transformed in our

hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstract also from the materialconstituents and forms which make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house,a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics areextinguished. Nor is it any longer the product of the labor of the joiner, the masonor the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labor . . .. [The]different concrete forms of labor . . . can no longer be distinguished, but are alltogether reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract. (Marx,1977: 128, emphasis in the original)

Through exchange, the commodity is stripped of its proper qualities, including both itsuse-value and the concrete forms of labour involved in producing it. What is left is



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a ‘congealed’ residue which Marx calls ‘human labor in the abstract’. A similardispropriation occurs with labour: as a strictly formal determination, ‘abstract labor’remains entirely indifferent to the content of labour itself. It is irrelevant whether agiven commodity was produced through craft skill or mechanized production, throughthe work of a master, an apprentice, or a machine. Abstract labour is simply arepresentation of the ‘socially necessary’ labour time that prevails in a given place andtime for the production of a specific commodity.

Marx’s analysis strips these concepts of their self-evidence. It demonstrates how‘universal’ terms, seemingly applicable anywhere and any time, in fact only becomethinkable within the historical time of capitalist production. Abstract labour can onlyemerge as a theoretical object in a capitalist society where the commodity form hasalready asserted itself as the dominant mode of production and valuation. To confirm

this, Marx turns to Aristotle’s discussion of value and exchange in the Nicomacheanethics, focusing on his view that exchange represents a theoretical impossibility.According to Marx, what prevented Aristotle from thinking the exchange relation wasthat Greek society had no concept of value:

Greek society was founded on the labor of slaves, hence had as its natural basis theinequality of men and of their labor-powers. The secret of the expression of value,namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labor because and in so far asthey are human labor in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion.This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is theuniversal form of the product of labor, hence the dominant social relation is the

relation between men as possessors of commodities. (Marx, 1977: 152)

At first Marx seems to be suggesting that it is only once the general idea of humanequality has established itself that one can begin to see discrete forms of human labourfor what they are – essentially alike. But then he quickly pulls the rug out from underthis Enlightenment perspective: the notion of human equality is not a universal conceptthat was merely awaiting its proper historical moment; it is a particular that owes itsemergence to the practice of commodity exchange. The argument threatens to lead usinto a vicious circle: the theoretical possibility of exchange requires that we firstestablish a common measure of value between A and B, and such a measure can only bederived from an abstraction of actual labour in favour of the prevailing ‘sociallynecessary labor time’. The naming of an equivalency between discrete forms of labour

in turn finds its condition of possibility in the idea of a general equality between humanbeings. But the ideals of liberty and equality in the relations between humans finallyprove to be a consequence of what Marx set out to explain in the first place: thepractice of commodity exchange.

The circular structure of this argument is by no means a flaw. The discussion of commodity production and exchange in Capital is fundamentally concerned with theway in which these practices give rise to and reinforce specific social relations, which inturn come to be seen as natural and self-evident rather than as products of a particularregime of accumulation, inscription and production. The analysis underscoresan important distinction concerning what we understand by ‘ideology’. For much of the Marxist tradition, ideology presupposes a split between knowledge and truth: at



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the level of truth, the subject of ideology knows not what he or she is truly doing.For instance, in capitalism one blinds oneself to the true nature of the commodity, orto the fact that the valuation of things is based on unequal relations between humanbeings, between capitalist and labourer. In the ‘Commodity’ chapter, however, thingsare not quite so simple. Here it is practice and not knowledge that accomplishes thework of ideology. The hand teaches the heart, circumventing the mind altogether. Atthe level of knowledge, then, there need be no ideological deception: even if we knowthat value determinations reflect the human labour and exploitation required toproduce the commodity, and that consequently no commodity is ‘really’ worth this orthat price, we still continue to act as if values belonged to the nature of things. Where,then, does this tendency to essentialize values come from? Marx’s answer is that it isthe practice of commodity exchange that sustains our belief in values as immanent to

things themselves. In the words of Slavoj Žižek, we ‘know very well what [we] aredoing, but still, we are doing it anyway’ (Ž ižek, 1989: 33).

This discussion helps shed light on Agamben’s account of the potential slippagebetween newly won political emancipation and new forms of domination. Akin to barelife in Agamben’s analysis, living labour embodies a fundamental paradox in Marx’stext. Its status suggests that the so-called ‘contradictions’ inherent to the capitalistmode of production are not the reef on which the system will one day founder. On thecontrary, they are precisely the driving force of capitalist expansion. The historicalappearance of the concept of ‘humanity’, signifier of equality and freedom fromtyranny, is the reverse side of a process through which what the Grundrisse calls ‘livinglabor’ is produced and put to work. The separation of the worker and ‘living labor’from the means of production – or what Marx calls ‘dead labor’ – marks the creation

of a new class whose members, in Marx’s words, ‘have nothing to sell except their ownskins’ (Marx, 1977, Vol. I: 873). Living labour thus names a condition of absolutepoverty. The nominal freedom to sell one’s labour as one pleases merely signals thatthe labourer has been stripped of the means of production and reduced to acommodity. But Marx also speaks of ‘living labor’ as activity. For one thing, it is the‘living source’ of all value as opposed to the lifeless source that is capital itself. But evenmore importantly, living labour names the vitality with which the working classstruggles to articulate its needs and give voice to new demands. ‘Living labor’ botharises through the experience of separation and gives form to the desire foremancipation from it (Marx, 1973: 295). It marks a conflict between irreconcilableattunements: between dispropriation and abjection on the one hand, and self-affirmation and desire for emancipation on the other. This conflict appears irresolvable:

living labour is the source of self-affirming speech because it has always already beenstripped of the means of production.

Of the living and the dead: history and language in DiamelaEltit’s Mano de obra

I now turn to Diamela Eltit’s novel Mano de obra, a literary treatment of post-dictatorship Chile. First, a clarification is in order concerning the relation between thisliterary work and what I am calling ‘post-dictatorship’. The novel is a commentary onpresent-day socioeconomics, and particularly on labour in an environment that



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resembles what Gilles Deleuze termed a ‘society of control’. The text reflects on aprofound rift in the sociopolitical landscape of post-dictatorship society: the way of lifeof one class – or, more precisely, the prevailing logic of the socioeconomic systemitself – threatens the existence of other sectors, and yet under current conditions therewould seem to be no effective way in which to symbolize this threat. Given theseeming inability to provide this conflict with a name – or, in the terms of ErnestoLaclau, the impossibility of linking particular conflicts with the state into a chain of equivalencies – post-dictatorship can be described as an order founded on dislocation.3

In exploring this situation, Eltit’s text marks the limit of the political and sociologicalconcept of ‘transition’ in so far as it presupposes a permanent ground – such as‘national history’ – against which change could be measured. The present order has itsorigin in the annihilation of any link to the past, the blocking of any possibility of

recounting or rewriting the recent past as history. And thus the text’s silence withregard to the experience and memories of dictatorship reflects the foreclosure of thepast – as history or memory – as an integral component of the post-dictatorship stateof ‘consensus’.

Before proceeding further, a word about the organization and tone of the workwill help to put the commentary that is to follow in perspective. The novel is dividedinto two halves, each of which corresponds to a specific locale in present-day Chile.The first part is set in the ‘sú per ’, a colossal supermarket in which the narrator isemployed. It is divided into multiple chapters, each of which is headed by a propername, the name of a city, and a date from the first decades of the twentieth century(more on these headings in a moment). The second half of the novel, entitled ‘PuroChile, 1973’, is an account of the narrator’s domestic life in an apartment shared with a

group of fellow employees. The tonalities of the respective sections differ significantly.The first part is a lyrical account in which we find interwoven ‘schizoid’ fantasies of thenarrator together with accounts of his dealings with demanding customers and sinistersupervisors. The ‘Puro Chile’ pages, meanwhile, portray in a somewhat more sobertone the desire for the popular – as well as its inaccessibility – in the time of post-dictatorship. The personal relations between housemates display a broad spectrum of attitudes, including the solidarity of the exploited as well as the petty jealousies andconflicts that are symptomatic of dislocatedness. The underlying impetus of the secondhalf is this collective’s unspoken search for a leader who would deliver them from theirabjection. The saga ends on a highly ambiguous note, as it becomes increasingly clearthat this group is guided by the same social imaginary that has dominated culturalpolitics in the region for the past two centuries. The unifying image they seek would

seem to be nothing more than a reflection of the same dominant signifiers(‘masculinity’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) that have sustained the fiction of nationalidentity in Latin America since colonial times. The final lines of the second part – ‘Caminamos. Demos vuelta la página’ – allow for two ways of hearing: if these wordshold open the hope of a new way or opening that would break away from the falsetotality of post-dictatorship, they can also be read as announcing the full reinscriptionof this shared yearning for the popular into the market-fuelled fiction of wholeness.

It is the relation between history and language that provides the point of departurefor this literary interrogation of post-dictatorship. In order to flesh out what is at stakein this relation, let us begin by turning to the chapter headings and the stark contrastthey establish with the content or action of the novel. Although no contextualization is



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offered for these proper names, it is not difficult to discern that those of the first half were names of radical labour journals dating from the early twentieth century, whilethe title of the second half was that of a leftist daily in Santiago from the early 1970s.The array of proper names, place names and dates creates the impression that we haveto do with a register of Chilean labour politics in the twentieth century, albeit one thatalso bears witness to the effacements and reinscriptions that mark that history as not-all. If the chapter titles allude to a certain history of popular struggle whose primarylocus was the conflict between labour and capital, the narrative itself portrays anentirely different historical moment in which the political force of the name ‘thepeople’ would seem to have been entirely neutralized. In other words, in the time of post-dictatorship the possibility of politicizing the conflict between labour and capitalhas effectively been suspended. The novel thus offers a (literary) representation of the

impossibility of (political) representation. It portrays a social order founded on theforeclosure of history as such: not only have all remnants and reminders of the strugglesand conflicts alluded to in the chapter headings been voided and forgotten, thisdisappearance has itself been rendered mute and invisible. The true violence of reinscription lies in its capacity to wipe out its own traces.

If these proper names can still be said to signify anything, it would be an absentabsence: these calcified signifiers call attention to the silent withdrawal of anypossibility of a labour movement – and thus the non-existence of a working class assuch – in present-day Chile. In his essay ‘From Class Struggle to Classless Struggle’,Etienne Balibar argues that the notion of class consciousness cannot be derived from themere fact of sharing similar social and economic conditions with others. Theemergence of a working class presupposes the work of naming: it requires the impetus

of a labour movement that would facilitate the formulation of desires, needs anddemands specific to this class. What Balibar calls ‘labour movement’ must be rigorouslydistinguished from the institutional structure of the labour organizations of civilsociety, in so far as the interaction between these domains entails the possibility of conflict, misunderstanding and betrayal as well as solidarity and cooperation. InBalibar’s words:

. . . not only have the workers’ organizations never ‘represented’ the totality of thelabour movement, but they have periodically been forced into conflict with it, partlybecause their representativity was founded on the idealization of certain fractions of the ‘collective labourer’ that occupied a central position at a given stage in theindustrial revolution, and partly because [this representative function] corresponded

to a form of political compromise with the state. As a result, there has always been amoment when the labour movement has needed to reconstitute itself in opposition toexisting practices and forms of organization (Balibar, 1991: 170).

The question of a labour movement, which is also the question of the political as such,is inextricably related to language. Rather than clarifying the relation between thepolitical and language, however, Balibar’s essay complicates it. On one hand, there canbe no class consciousness and no politics without language, no new initiatives orcollective ‘movement’ that does not act in the name of something. But at the same time,as the passage just cited reminds us, the act of naming is fraught with risk: to representor to be represented is to expose oneself to the possibility of misunderstanding and



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betrayal.4 We would do well to recall this inherent tension, for it helps to guard againsta particular misreading of Eltit’s text: i.e. that the denunciation of ‘consensus’ ispremised on an idealized view of the history of the labour politics in Chile.

Balibar’s essay provides us with another way of looking at the double question of history and inscription and/or writing. Specifically, this approach marks the limit of theidealist view of language as it relates to history and the political. Representation cannever fully capture the truth of history or the political; there is always something thatescapes the economy of signification. But at the same time, Balibar also avoids the trapof conflating this limit with a nominalist position (i.e. representation falls short becausethere is something positive in every particular that universal concepts are unable torepresent). The limit that short-circuits signification is, like the ‘moment of reconstitution’ described by Balibar, an excess that emerges from within

representation itself. If the present order of ‘consensus’ coincides with the calculatedexclusion of certain histories and their particular, material contents, then the veryepistemological practice of history – which the Western tradition has alwaysunderstood from the perspective of a transcendent subject: as causality, progress,emergence of the Idea, etc. – is itself a form of inscription based on effacement. Theobject of ‘exclusion’ here is something other than those specific, determinate identitiesdeemed not to ‘fit’ within a given order. Indeed, ‘exclusion’ is already in effect as soonas we have to do with the naming of identity itself (the identity of a labour movementwithin the organizational structure of civil society, for instance).

More than one reader has interpreted Eltit’s novel as a commentary on whatRaquel Olea calls ‘the dissolution of the social’, and as lending support to the view thatneoliberalism threatens the destruction of collectives while eroding the foundation that

sustained them in an earlier era. The neoliberal ideology of ‘consensus’ marks theemergence of a new order in which social relations have lost their relative autonomyand find themselves increasingly subject to the logic of economic exchange andconsumption. The tendential subsumption of the social by the market is seen ashastening a decline in sociality as such: the logos of civil society, grounded in theprinciples of universal recognition and inalienable rights, gives way to the nihilism of the market, where it is everyone for themselves and the other only interests me in sofar as she or he has something I wish to buy. By the same token, this interpretiveposition also finds in Eltit’s novel a testament to the urgency of establishing new moraland cultural values as jetties that would protect against the erosion of values. Such aposition is at least implicit in Olea’s reading of the novel as a condemnation of theconsumerist devastation of social space and language: ‘The loss of public discourse

finds its expression in rudeness, the sign of a social immolation that is signified by thespeaking of a language emptied out of all meaning’ (Olea, n.d.: n.p.).5 Accordingly,the story told in Mano de obra would be that of the decline of the highest values togetherwith a call for revaluation. The linking of this language that has been voided of meaningwith the nihilism of the market implies that an alternative order might serve as aconduit to meaningful or full language.

However much one sympathizes with such a position, in my view it is precisely thedifference between ‘empty’ and ‘full’ language that Eltit’s text puts into question.What is more, by placing this metaphysical distinction in doubt, the text unavoidablyapproaches the limit of valuation as such. In this light, any moralist or culturalistattempt to recuperate the conceptual force of ‘value’ against the corrosive effects of the



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market would stumble in so far as it has blinded itself to the shared metaphysical originof values thinking and nihilism.6 The recourse to values as an antidote to nihilism is afetish which, by sustaining the fictive loss of something it never possessed to beginwith, thereby turns a blind eye to the true status of the name (more on this in amoment). What remains to be determined, then, is what this limit has to say to us:does devaluation merely threaten to lead us into the desert of unchecked nihilism, ordoes this vanishing point in fact harbour an opening where something other than thereproduction of the same might become thinkable? While this question is crucial, I donot wish to suggest that it is simply a matter of taking sides when it comes to reading,since this would be to miss a fundamental point: that literature always finds itself speaking on both sides of this limit at the same time, and that these voices can never bebrought together and reconciled as if they were part of a single tendency or idea. By the

same token, while my intention is to read Eltit’s text ‘against the grain’ of theculturalist position just outlined, my own interpretation will nevertheless prove unableto free itself completely from the referential framework upon which that positiondepends.

A brief discussion of the linguistic concepts of the signifier and the signified willhelp to situate the counter-reading I am proposing. While the notion of the signified isoften equated with ‘referent’ or ‘idea’, it is also more or less synonymous with ‘value’as it has been presented both in the section on Marx and in the preceding discussion of culture and nihilism. The question I wish to pursue here concerns the status of thename or the signifier as it relates to the use of language and the production of meaning.As Saussure showed, languages are comprised of differences rather than positive ordeterminate contents. Meaning does not depend on natural, permanent links between

word and idea or word and thing, but is a function of the difference between one wordand another. No signifier is able to account for its meaning by itself, but must insteaddefer to another signifier, and that signifier to another, and so on. The total picture of language can thus be described by the metaphor of a chain in which meaning circulates

– or is deferred – from one signifier to another. From these well-known principles wecan conclude that it is of the very nature of the signifier that it have no necessary linkwith any signified. The ‘essence’ of the signifier is its lack of any essence. Theontological void or ‘lack’ at the heart of the signifier distinguishes language from code,for which each symbol does in fact refer to one idea alone.

Values thinking, on the other hand, aligns itself with the perceived necessity of thesignified. It presupposes values and their recognition as a condition of possibility forsocial relations as such. In the absence of these stable points of reference, sociality

would be overwhelmed by the self-affirming drive of the individual will and quicklyregress into a Hobbesian war of all against all. But the discourse of values becomesproblematic in so far as it neglects to consider the historicity of its own ground, thecontingency that both sustains and delimits it. It has convinced itself that value or thesignified is all there truly is, and that everything else is mere appearance. As part of themetaphysical tradition, values thinking can only think being as transcendence of form(the form of value as such, as opposed to particular values).

In light of what has just been said about the signifier, let us now turn again to thechapter titles, ‘dead letters’ that have been torn from their sociopolitical context andleft to refer only to themselves. What first grabs our attention is their being out-of-place, the sense in which these names ‘stick out’ and refuse to blend in with their



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surroundings. The inclusion of specific dates and place names, instead of conferringdepth and richness, only intensifies the prevailing sense of interruption and oblivion.If one can be certain that these proper names once referred to something concrete andliving in another time and place, this specificity is akin to that of a Benjaminian ruinwhose mute presence attests not to a lost plenitude but rather to the void within it. Thepoint is not that these names once enjoyed a proper meaning, only to be deprived of itat a later point in time; nor, by the same token, did they once refer to a plenitude thatwas subsequently emptied out. The dislocatedness they display in Eltit’s text onlyrenders visible what was always already there: the material lack of the signifier, itsinability to speak for itself on the one hand and to secure a permanent relation withsome external source of meaning on the other hand. This ‘nothingness’, if we can call itthat, is not something that can be rectified or overcome through addition: no

recuperation or reinstitution of values could surpass this negativity, since the ‘lack’ is infact the condition of possibility for any act of naming whatsoever.

Several tropological figures in the text appear to establish a clear referential key forreading the novel as an allegory of post-dictatorship Chile. To the extent that they doso, the text would support the ‘decline and revaluation of values’ position outlinedabove. As previously noted, the first half of Mano de obra takes place in a colossalsupermarket, which the narrator refers to as ‘el sú per ’. The ubiquitous use of the term‘sú per ’ signals a myriad of substitutions, displacements and reinscriptions in the time of post-dictatorship. For one, it marks the end of the factory as paradigm for capitalistproduction, and its replacement by the service industry and its increasing disregard forspecialization. In this new setting, alienation is not only or even primarily a function of the separation of the worker from the means of production. It names the labourer’s

inability to find his or her own particular ‘mark’ reflected in the object, since theproduct of labour shows only its absolute indifference to the question of who made itand how. Whereas the Fordist model still allowed space for subjectivity in theworkplace despite the reality of mass-production – the labourer can always find thismark of pride when purchasing a car she or he helped assemble – in the post-Fordistworkplace of Mano de obra corporate control is predicated on extending and deepeningthe worker’s dependent abjection, to such a degree that one is now content to be ableto say that one is exploited – because that means one still has a job. The sú per reflectsthe relentless elimination of the rights of the labourer; at the same time, it attests to theimplementation of new, increasingly sinister technologies of supervision and control.

‘The customers . . . meet in the supermarket only in order to talk’ (Eltit, 2002:14). ‘The customers take over the supermarket as a venue [sede ] (a mere infrastructure)

for their meetings’ (2002: 15). These two passages comment tropologically on thesubstitution of the market for that former gathering place, the public and civic spaceof the town square. The division between spheres of life (the public and the private;the economic, the political, and the cultural; etc.), once regarded as a fundamentalprinciple of modernity, has now become unstable. As a reflection of production and itsshaping of social relations, the first passage suggests – without even a hint of parody – the extent to which the subjectivity of the narrator, a low-level employee, is bound toan identification with the discourse of the master. The remark, which might easily havecome from the mouth of a manager or owner, is drawn from the rationale of themarket, classifying customers on the basis of their purchasing tendencies (e.g. the high-volume ‘buenos clientes’, the slow-moving ‘viejos del súper’ who buy little and



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belabour others with their endless questions, and so on). The bad clients are those whocome to look, fraternize and complain rather than to buy, and who block the aisles andimpede the circulation of other shoppers. To use a linguistic analogy, they are akin to aheavy accent, a stutter or slip of the tongue (all well-known phenomena in Eltit’swriting) – excesses of speech, devoid of any meaningful content, which interfere in theexchange of information and prevent language itself from silently retreating from thescene.

The second phrase, which substitutes ‘sede’ for ‘sú per ’, repeats the socioeconomicprocess of condensation and displacement at the level of the signifier (metaphor andmetonymy). In general usage, the Spanish ‘sede’ would be translated as ‘the venue foran event’. But it also has the more specific institutional meanings of ‘the headquartersof an organization’ and ‘the seat of a government’. The polysemy itself provides a

tropological figure for the increasing indistinction between public and private, as wellas the corresponding intensification of the market’s grip on the real. The old divisionbetween civil society (‘the headquarters of an organization’) and state (‘the seat of agovernment’) has been collapsed into the sú per as the new – and false – totality of thesocial. If we read this second phrase literally, it is as if the sú per had become the only siteat which anything could happen today. Or, more bleakly, it is as if the market haddisplaced history as the domain of events and suspended the possibility of anything(real or different) happening at all.

The sú per would thus seem to receive tropological confirmation as the part thatstands for the new whole, el mercado. The metonymic link lends support to theperception of the market as the sine qua non of all social organization; or, in the wordsof Francis Fukuyama, that free-market capitalism has finally triumphed over its

adversaries and emerged as the ‘coherent and directional [historical force] that willeventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy’ (Fukuyama, 1992:xii). But perhaps things are not quite so simple – literarily or historically speaking.If the market in fact comprises the new horizon for thinking today as this scenariowould seem to imply, it is therefore necessarily beyond referentiality since, as horizon,it is what allows for the possibility of questioning or representing in the first place. If we assert that the market is ‘all there is’ today, then we are also saying – whether weknow it or not – that the essence of the market has yet to be thought. The text wouldthus perform neither a metonymy nor an allegory but the impossibility of metonymyand allegory. Or, better yet, it would allegorize the inability of literary language toestablish a secure referential link with its object. Things are thus a good deal less clearthan first meets the eye. Already at the threshold, the text initiates two irreconcilable

gestures: while it bears witness critically to the subsumption of the social by themarket, at the same time it plants a seed of doubt concerning the possibility of rendering a reliable representation of history and the social totalities to which it givesshape.7

The rhetorical gestures can be understood as part of a larger strategy of confronting a certain crisis of representation. This crisis has two distinct but relatedsenses, both of which can be linked to the discussion of history and inscription. First,this notion implicates representation as a literary term. The conceptual stability of ‘literature’ enters into crisis in so far as traditional views of its nature and purpose nolonger coincide with the conditions in which literary works are produced and readtoday. Partially as a consequence of the profound social, political and economic



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transformations we have been discussing, the literary aesthetic can no longer be said tooccupy the privileged position it held in the Western tradition for much of the previoustwo centuries, when, through the influence of Friedrich Schiller, Matthew Arnold andothers, both the ‘great works’ of the Western tradition and national literatures came,each in its own way, to be seen as indispensable for the shaping of citizens whoidentified themselves as members of a nation. If it is the case today that ‘the nation’ nolonger orients our identity as social actors (providing the framework for our tastes, ourdesires, our moral codes, and so on), then literature can no longer be seen as themimesis of a people, as bringing into view the essential traits of, for example, ‘Chilean-ness’.

The other sense of crisis is closely related, and stems from the suspicion that thecurrent reordering of the social, economic and political spheres is in the process of

calling into question what modern theories of democracy have always taken forgranted: the possibility and the necessity of political representation or hegemony. If theconcept of political representation presupposes that the state mediates socialinteractions between different groups and individual citizens, and that civil society inturn constitutes a more or less stable locus for addressing demands to the state, thenthe emergence of the neoliberal state – characterized by the subsumption of civilsociety by the market – would seem to announce the beginning of the end of representational politics as such.

By way of conclusion, I return to the question of sovereignty with which this paperbegan. Taken together, the two possible readings of Eltit’s text I have been discussingprovide a framework through which a literary thought of sovereignty can be discerned.As Maurice Blanchot has shown, literature asserts that the true sovereign is language

itself. At the same time, however, literature ruins the concept of sovereignty byexposing the non-ground or constitutive limit of any order instituted by sovereigndecision. We can clarify this first statement by turning to Agamben’s assertion that‘language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there isnothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself’ (Agamben, 1998:20). After Hegel, the notion that nothing is outside language cannot be written off asidealist delusion: what it says, among other things, is that the distinction betweenlanguage and its other (non-language, nature, the real, etc.) is itself a linguisticoperation – that is, this difference can only be posited from within language andthrough language. Paraphrasing Hegel’s critique of Kant, the prelinguistic real is anoumenal shadow cast by the phenomenon of language. And thus, whenever we faultrepresentation for its failure to reveal the thing as it truly is, we forget that we are

already standing well within representation as we posit the distinction betweenrepresentation and truth.In what way, then, does the literary show or enact the two irreconcilable sides of

sovereignty? To speak of literature is always to say too much and too little: it is toattempt to name and categorize what cannot be assigned a single, unified intention.Literature never ceases to trace the primordial wound that separates thinking andspeaking from being. It reminds us repeatedly of the aporias and instabilities that hauntthe meanings and values we habitually attribute to the nature of things themselves. Butwhen we attempt to define literature’s attitude toward this rift we encounter aproblem. On one hand, literature’s desire is to heal the wound and return to thingswhat is rightfully theirs. It longs to recover or establish a direct, unmediated relation to



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the real. At the same time, however, literature also points out the impossibility of thistask by showing us that it is in fact the hand of language itself that severs thinking andwords from being. Literature, then, both exemplifies the logic of sovereignty andmarks the limit of the sovereign state as a natural, self-sustaining order. It bears witnessto the very fact that language takes place, which is to say that it communicates the senseof an emerging world. In the words of Agamben’s Language and Death, ‘the sphere of the utterance includes that which, in every speech act, refers exclusively to its takingplace, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said and meant in it. Pronounsand other indicators of the utterance, before they designate real objects, indicateprecisely that language takes place’ (Agamben, 1991: 25).

Notes

1 In Agamben’s words, this reversibility of exclusion and inclusion takes the form of ‘theinscription within the body of the nomos of the exteriority that animates it and gives itmeaning’ (Agamben, 1998: 26).

2 In fact, Agamben goes a good deal further than this, asserting that only a completeabandonment of the concept of sovereignty could enable us to put an end to theseemingly limitless encroachment of the state on bare life, and in so doing to begin tothink a truly emancipatory politics. I will not comment any further on Agamben’s claimexcept to say that it would appear to signal the true – and problematic – intention of Homo Sacer : to write a total history of sovereignty.

3 On the difference between ‘antagonism’ and ‘dislocation’, see Laclau and Mouffe(1985).

4 This can also be formulated as a tension between the constative and performativedimensions of language: to name something (or to act in the name of it) is to assert its apriori existence, but it is also necessarily to alter the context in which one acts. Theemergence of a political movement exemplifies this double register: if on one hand thehypothetical movement calls attention to inequalities and injustices that have previouslybeen ignored by the state, on the other hand there can be no movement – no gatheringand no action – prior to the act of naming.

5 This and all subsequent translations from the Spanish are my own.6 See Martin Heidegger (1998).7 In concrete terms, this uncertainty can be expressed as a question concerning the status

of what we can call, for the sake of convenience, ‘globalization’. One standard view onglobalization sees it as more or less synonymous with the tendential dominance of neoliberalism and the US throughout the world, and thus takes a decidedly dim view of

its course: globalization is ushering in a new time of increasing homogenization anddestruction of collectivities in favour of consumer-driven individualism, intensificationof the disparities between rich and poor, and so on. While these dangers are real andmust not be overlooked, it seems to me that this prognosis only acknowledges one sideof the process or event called ‘globalization’, and that it fails to take into considerationthe possibility that what appears now as ‘decline’ or ‘devaluation’ may one day showitself as having been the emergence of a new sense in the world. What historicalmoment, after all, has not been seen by some as the decline of truth (‘civilization’,‘culture’, ‘values’, ‘our way of life’, etc.) and as the onset of a nihilistic age in which theonly stable value is that of the self-affirming will to power?



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References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1991. Language and Death: the Place of Negativity . Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press.

Balibar, Etienne. 1991. From Class Struggle to Classless Struggle. In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London:Verso.

Eltit, Diamela. 2002. Mano de obra. Santiago: Planeta.Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Heidegger, Martin. 1998. On the Question of Being. In Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantall Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a

Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , Vol. I. New York: Vintage.Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. Baltimore, MD: Penguin.Olea, Raquel. N.d. La disolución de lo social: acerca de la novela Mano de Obra de Diamela

Eltit. crı́tica.cl . Available at: http://www.critica.cl/; INTERNET.Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology . London: Verso.

PatrickDove is Assistant Professor at Indiana University. His recent publications include

The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature

(Bucknell University Press, 2004) as well as articles on literature, testimonio and nihilism.

His current project undertakes a re-examination of literary aesthetics in the context of

post-dictatorship and neoliberalism.


Documents

Living Labor, History and the Signifier