ABSTRACT
The human body has always been a political site. Its biological, ontological, and material constitution, given and directed by its geo-cultural situation, means that its genetic materiality and thus its outward appearance will affect its position and its access to other constituted political fields. In this chapter, I refer to this imaged body as a living capital body (lcb), as an object ontologically formed and durationally determined within contemporary late capitalist cultures. In its relational constitution, the lcb comes to be visible, and able to be visualized, through certain political frames, such as the politics of the racialized skin, the politics of the gender, the politics of the age, the politics of the place of birth, and so on. From Marx, we understand that the actions of the value of the body of the worker is the living value of the proletariat’s body. This value situates that body within its industrial political field of work (for example, see Lefebvre 2009, 146ff). In contemporary terms, the gender and racialized configurations of the value accorded to the living labor of the worker’s body, within a digitally constituted political field of work, mean that the lcb is a coded, encrypted image and exists within a digital data field where all movements are monitored, but outcomes are nevertheless inchoate due to the nature of data. The lcb is held and holds a force of variable strength, feeding and animating the system of capital, but in ways different from the industrial lcb. Post-Foucault, the technology-image produced by the biopoliticized, digitized body is creating new political fields, recognizable by their aesthetic domains.
