In all of these processes, lives are directly at stake. In this rethinking of the conditions of the reproduction of life, I combine the analysis of global capitalism with the disintegration of the welfare state and the privatization of the public sphere; these processes are considered "natural" along with an intense process of normalization of fascist, chauvinist, racist and antisemitic tendencies in Slovenia, Austria, Europe, and the world.
The state and its apparatuses, the ministries of science, education, culture, etc., have abandoned the function they had in the past as benefactors of public educational institutions and the public non-commercial art and cultural institutions.
The neoliberal capitalist state and its apparatuses exert constant pressure on independent art, cultural and educational institutions, and state public institutions to rely more and more on private funding, thus enforcing a terrain of dependency similar to drug addiction.
A critique of white citizenship
The question of prosthesis and digitization expands our conglomerations of augmented humans or assemblages of post-human realities. We can use the prosthetic and connect it to something that seems impossible: prosthetic citizenship.
Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese write in "In an Impaired State: Settler Racial Logic and Prosthetic Citizenship in Australia," based on Pugliese's concept of prosthetic citizenship (Pugliese 2007, 13–15), that the prosthetic citizenship given to all those non-white future second and third category citizens in the occidental neoliberal state regime is to be seen as a form of citizenship between the citizen and the non-human (Perera and Pugliese 2020). Therefore, the prosthetic becomes a uniquely racialized prosthesis given to various non-white bodies as a "white-techne" or racialized prosthetic limb. Why limb? Because it can be put on and taken off.
The neoliberal state bestows or removes "citizenship" as a gratuitous gesture. Where do you stand in this necropolitical state-administration death-roulette? Perera and Pugliese (2020, 483) write "the racialized dynamics of prosthetic citizenship" are there for "securing whiteness and securitizing subjects of color" and that they can be easily taken away from those non-white citizens if they qualify as a danger to neoliberal democratic societies.
As Gonan and Gonan (2020, 197) point out with reference to P. Valentine (2012) and the anonymous authors (2010) of "Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism," violence against women, trans*, intersex, and queer people is not an unfortunate or accidental circumstance, but such disciplinary violence is constitutive of sexual reproduction; the violence is there to maintain the form gender identities and sexual relations of reproductions have for the capital production of the surplus-value of profit.
Put simply, the new interest is the strict distinction between labor that produces value for capital and reproductive labor that is (repeatedly) presented as unproductive, or as less valuable, or as not financially productive enough (care work, housework, child rearing) for capital.
Citing Roswitha Scholz (2016), Gonan and Gonan argue, "One of the central elements of capitalism as such is precisely the process of strict separation of value-creating labor, which is valued financially, and that which does not create value and is not valued financially." (2020, 197; trans. Gržinić)
"Scholz uses the term Wert-Abspaltung [value separation] to make this distinction." (Gonan and Gonan 2020, 197, n3; trans. Gržinić)
This distinction, which is socially produced and artificial, and organized directly by capital, rather than in some kind of labor-capital relationship of past times, currently represents the only agenda of the neoliberal state. And as Scholz (2016) has shown, the neoliberal state does only this: lists which forms of labor are productive and which are unproductive or less productive; content is exchanged for a form of value. Consequently, so-called productive labor must have a privileged position over unproductive labor, although what matters is that "so-called defined unproductive" reproductive labor (such as housework, care work, etc.) is key for "productive labor" to be functional and available to capital to enable it to fully extract surplus value from such labor.
To maintain the distinction between them requires certain forms of property, the state, the nuclear family, and a sexual arrangement that codifies the heterosexual household through gender roles, gender violence, and so on. Gendered violence against women and queer people, along with other factors, thus serves a constitutive function for capitalism in maintaining difference and hierarchy between these forms of labor.
The separation and privileged position of productive labor is established by ascribing certain attributes to productive and unproductive labor. These attributes (proactivity, strength, determination, etc. for productive labor and tenderness, care work, and lack of rationality for unproductive labor) are sexually marked and neutralized, which means that we understand them as essential qualities of people with certain bodies-attributes-whose bodies we assume have the capacity to give birth, even if the realization of this function is not crucial. (2020, 197; trans. Gržinić)
The element of value is key and, as I will now elaborate, a racialized category, but not as rhetoric, but as a category that is constructed and exploited and directly related to capital profit and private property. The question of value in capitalism is one of the key issues that offer new possibilities for Marxist queer theorists and activists.
In their text, Mia and Lina Gonan (2020) show a shift that is occurring with the casino of neoliberal capitalism in relation to value. Mia and Lina Gonan show that it was long accepted that biological capabilities were the key element of subjugation and discrimination for women in capitalist reproduction. This was an important point for Marxist feminists. In the analysis of white women, labor was constantly discriminated against in the process of reproduction. Their work as care work and housework was less valuable or "unproductive."
The thesis was that this was because the patriarchal capitalist system saw the "birth of babies" as a key point in the reproduction of the nation-state. Therefore, women should stay at home and do this work. This is also one of the basic logics of the fascist organization of societies. If we add race to class differentiation and gender differentiation, then the analysis shows the violent process of racialization and discrimination imposed on Black women and POC that doubles and triples their segregation.
Although Mia and Lina Gonan ask, if this is the main point of subjugation, discrimination, and violence against women, then why are trans* women (trans women opt for surgical or hormonal transition, a male-to-female conversion, and therefore have fewer opportunities to have children) also severely oppressed? The same goes for trans* men (trans men* opt for surgical or hormonal transition, a female-to-male transition). For this very reason, they argue that gender problems do not seem to lie in "biological functions," as trans* women and some intersex people, despite not having children, experience systematic violence; thus, gender problems do not lie in "biological functions" but in the function that the sexual "form" (as male, female) performs for capital (Gonan and Gonan 2020, 196–197).
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid
Icons of glamour, echoes of death, 1982 (fragment)
VHS, color, 11.23 min; produced by SKUC-Forum, Ljubljana, 1982
(Video made under the name Meje kontrole št. 4// The Borders of Control no.4 //)
This was the first video work framed by the new conceptual horizons of the 1980s, imbued with the ideology of the underground and politics.
In this video, the phantasmatic world of a woman, a fashion model (played by Marina Gržinić), is contrasted with her friend (played by Aina Šmid), a person whose (double) gender is fully revealed at the end of the video when we see a phallus between her legs. In the meantime, it is clear that this model is at least a transvestite, who easily changes gender in his speech. This switching, however, is accompanied by a neurotic tic: she constantly holds her hand in front of her face.
As an archetypal image that is both comic and tragic, this performed tic creates a certain distance between the body and the speech act, pointing to our constitutive dual nature: the distinction between what we are and what we say. This neurotic tic also suggests certain other dislocations, both about the setting of the entire video, which was filmed in a private apartment, and to the fundamental disorientation in the main character's life.
Her tic causes constant interruptions in the narrative plot, which is in itself quite painful: both characters remember their childhood, their school days, and their first experience with masturbation.