Below is a first draft of an introduction to an essay that revives a long dormant project on the ‘spaces of capital’. The initial prompt to return to this work came from Maurizio Lazzarato’s framing of luxury subjectivities and trash subjectivities in Revolutions of Capitalism. In Hwang Sok-yong’s Familiar Things, workers can no longer afford to live in the city and instead reside in a landfill site, where they make a living picking through waste for the remainders of value. This condition is experienced as the loss of a world in Cesar Aira’s Shantytown. In this sense, both novels respond to and revise conceptions of what trash subjectivities might mean, but they also question the philosophy of the event which orientates Lazzarato’s work.
Maurizio Lazzarato’s recently translated Revolutions of Capitalism: The Politics of the Event (2026) argues that transformations within what constitutes economically productive activities necessitates changes at the level of theory. Originally published in 2004, Revolutions of Capitalism emerges from the alter-globalization protests of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, a movement of movements which articulated itself most fully in the days of Seattle and the slogan ‘Another World is Possible’. For Lazzarato, an event ‘is not the solution to a problem but rather an opening of possibles’, an encounter with discontinuities and potentialities within the world which in turn need to be actualized by corporeal bodies and assemblies. In a present flanked by aspiring techno-overlords and esoteric right-wing conspiracies, some of Lazzarato’s references themselves seem to belong to an alternate, parallel world, one in which the Internet remains a centrifugal network to be surfed rather than its current version, monopolized by platforms whose brain-rotted users doomscroll their way through the end times.
Left-wing activists are not the only ones alert to the possibilities of the event, to the ways in which it can produce a change in feeling, re-organize the distribution of desire, and effectuate new subjectivities. The production of difference and its subordination to the demands of accumulation are also crucial to the operations of the post-Fordist corporation. In Lazzarato’s account, the ‘corporate-function’ has separated itself from the ‘factory-function’, with investment primarily channeled towards the budgets of the so-called creatives, the advertising gurus and marketing savants who invite us to adopt new forms of life, encourage us to take up new habits, and incite new modes of self-presentation. Corporations do not so much create objects as they create the worlds in which those objects might find a home. In this sense, the production of subjectivity and desire precedes the production of things, which are reproduced secondarily as commodities, services, and experiences. Hence Lazzarato’s provocative claim that ‘capitalism does not arrive first with factories. These come afterward, if they come at all … It arrives with words, signs, and images’.
Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Lazzarato situates the historic separation of the corporation from the factory within the context of societies of control. Unlike the disciplinary societies of industrial capitalism, which ‘molded bodies by forming habits primarily as bodily memory’, control societies ‘modulate brains and form habits as mental memory’. Power retrains its sights on the mind, on attention and the intellect, which it acts on from a distance through technologies of images, sounds, and data. When it comes to the economy, control societies ‘are characterized by an expansion in the supply of “worlds”’; that is to say, an increase in the range of possible lifestyles that are available for subjectivities to orient their striving towards.
There is a double movement at work here, whereby an incorporeal transformation of the soul is followed by a material incarnation in the body. As Lazzarato explains, the adverts, images, and slogans which flow without slackening through our brains produce ‘a change in sensibility, in our manner of evaluation’. Yet for these virtual worlds to be fulfilled they must be propagated materially, purchased and acquired, ‘realized in bodies’. Part of Lazzarato’s critique of Marxism concerns its inability to interpret these semiotic emissions as anything other than ideology. Rather than address consciousness and representation, advertising, for example, acts on pre-subjective and pre-conscious material, on affects, moods, and feelings. Lazzarato: ‘these incorporeal transformations, which run through our heads like refrains, that circulate instantaneously all over the planet, that enter every home, constitute the true weapon of mass destruction, of conquest, of prehension of brains and bodies, are simply incomprehensible for Marxist and economic theories’.
The fact that ‘television networks do not recognize borders between nations, classes, status, [and] income’, opens up another point of tension between ‘actualization’ in souls and ‘incarnation’ in bodies, but this time, at the level of the collective. Perpetually broadcast and unceasingly streamed across the globe, images of possible worlds are received and accessed by all, regardless of credit score or purchasing power. Sensibilities are changed and modulated; however, the new variations of living are unevenly materialized. Borrowing from the Brazilian psychoanalyst and philosopher Suely Rolnik, Lazzarato suggests that humanity is bifurcating into an opposition between ‘the glamor of “luxury” subjectivity and the misery of “trash” subjectivity’. Large sections of the global population, in other words, find themselves increasingly subject to a regime of signs which modifies their desires but from whose promises of the good life they are structurally excluded. Instead, these groups have to live amidst, beside, and below the signs of possible worlds which cannot be incarnated in their bodies but which their labor not infrequently serves.
This polarization of society into luxury subjectivities, on the one hand, and trash subjectivities, on the other, has only accelerated in the intervening twenty-plus years since Revolutions of Capitalism first appeared in French. If the causes of wealth inequality have become a topic of heated political discussion, their psychosocial effects have also attracted the attention of the arts. The immiserated return as a perturbation within the otherwise ambient vibes of the glamorous across a range of cultural formats and national contexts. A decidedly non-exhaustive list would included the popular televisual anthology series The White Lotus (United States), Bong Joon Ho’s award-wining film Parasite (South Korea), and Fernanda Melchor’s literary novel Paradais (Mexico). To varying degrees of success, these works explore one of the scenes that Lazzarato claims most haunts contemporary capitalism, the co-existence of multiple possible but incompatible worlds, a folding together of encounters which produce unpredictable but often extremely messy outcomes. To amplify the language of the street, a nascent ‘Eat the Rich’ genre appears to be flourishing within the culture industry, of which Mark Mylod’s 2022 black comedy The Menu would be a staple.
There has been a renewed interest in the question of misery and the immiseration thesis within Marxist scholarship too. Phenomena like jobless recoveries, slow growth, and the generalization of regimes of precarious labor have sparked a re-engagement with Marx’s writing on the ‘general law of accumulation’ in chapter 25 of Capital, volume one. Noting the conjunction of the ‘enforced idleness’ of some workers and the ‘over-work’ of others, Marx argues that increases in the social productivity of labor tend to reproduce sections of the working class as external to capital’s immediate needs – that is, as relatively superfluous. This production of non-production, or structurally necessary non-work, informs Fredric Jameson’s bemusing claim that Capital is a book about unemployment, one whose contemporary reserve armies can be found among the slums, refugee camps, and migrant detention centers that encircle the planet. The Endnotes collective have likewise parsed the impasses and possibilities of proletarianized workers who are ‘produced by capital without producing capital’, workers who are locked out from the social protections of the salary but locked into the world of the market. Joshua Clover’s theorization of the riot as the form of political actions that most effectively corresponds to struggles over circulation similarly emerges from a consideration of the flightiness of financialized surplus capital, on the one hand, and the stickiness of wage-less surplus populations, on the other.
The structural logic of economic exclusion and an experiential poetics of trash are perhaps most powerfully combined in Mike Davis’s totemic Planet of Slums. Davis bleakly writes that ‘the late capitalist triage of humanity […] has already taken place’. When they are not dreaming of planetary exodus, the one percent are bunkered down in enclaves, gated communities, and militarized ranches, instantiating the ‘off-worlds’ of science fiction. Meanwhile, the informal proletariat, whose re-incorporation into the circuits of global capital Davis remains doubtful, are warehoused in urban slums, which process and sort surplus humanity. Aligned with his militancy, Davis finds an imaginative resonance for this situation in Patrick Chamoiseu’s Texaco, which creolizes the historical novel and traces ‘a proletariat without factories, workshops, and work, without bosses, in the muddle of odd jobs, drowning in survival and leading an existence like a path through embers’. Named after a makeshift shantytown on the edges of Fort de France, the capital of Martinique, Texaco documents the successive attacks on the encampment launched by ‘the city’, whose plans for demolition, clearance, and modernization are repelled. Texaco is less interested in confronting the hypnotic identification with luxury subjectivities – and their degustation – than in imagining the voices, hopes, and inventiveness of those classified and classed as waste. In what follows, I would like to explore Lazzarato’s philosophy of the event through this idea of ‘trash subjectivities’, setting it in dialogue with novels by Cesar Aira and Hwang Sok-yong, fictions which engage with spaces of bifurcation, where the bodies of those discarded by capital make a (surplus) living among the residue of discarded commodities. In Aira’s Shantytown the poor believe they ‘no longer have a world’ and it is to the event of ‘worldlessness’ that I would now like to turn.
Thomas Travers 