In The Capital of Accumulation (2010), an ideological homage to Rosa Luxemburg, the magmatic flow of working bodies and restless revolutionaries sets the tempo for global capital. In late-stage capitalism, what subjectivities emerge when labor is disembodied before its own autopsy—when the body of work becomes spectral even before it is mourned?
Unidentified, unmourned spectral bodies pose a central question to any narrative that tries to construct a narrative of “Capital as Progress”. And that is, “What is the human cost of the accumulation of capital?”
In The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg argued that on a planet overtaken by capital, there is no “outside” left: no more “pre-capitalist” societies, nothing “outside” capital. Capital then begins to erode the ground on which it stands, and, in doing so, the residue of capital is excavated. We could say that it’s like digging mass graves to build new cemeteries. This leads to an accumulation of unidentified bodies, a heap of the residues of capital’s histories - or, as you say, “labor disembodied before its autopsy”.
The Capital of Accumulation has an unidentified body in its heart, Rosa Luxemburg’s body. Dr. Michael Tsokos, the forensic pathologist at Berlin’s Charité Hospital, had come to believe that the headless torso kept as a “teaching specimen” by the hospital was a relic of Rosa Luxemburg, and the film talks to Tsokos and others about their attempts to prove this. If this were indeed the case, then Rosa’s haunting presence is like an allegory that anchors her argument about the limits of capitalist extraction. The remainder refuses to be resolved.
On the facade of the Palace of Culture and Science, built in 1955 in Warsaw, we came across the larger than life-size sculpture of a sari-clad Indian woman. This is the figure we make a claim to as being, for us, Rosa Luxemburg’s alter ego: Luxme Sorabgur—an anagram of Rosa Luxemburg.
The name has an Indian ring to it, with Luxme as a passable version of “Lakshmi”—deified as the goddess of wealth in Indic mythologies. Since all wealth, and most capital, is living labor, we found it interesting to think of Rosa Luxemburg’s imagined Indian alter ego as a woman called Luxme. Carrying, in her name, the ambivalent sense of being the living labor that congeals into capital, dead labor.
In The Capital of Accumulation, Luxme is an interlocutor, asking us, the audience, and Rosa Luxemburg all sorts of questions. She reads the long history of industrial capital in the twentieth century through the prisms of Bombay, Berlin, and Warsaw, and, by doing so, she narrates not the dead weight of times past, but the seeds of possibilities.
Your moving images act as solvents of time, dissolving the hardened layers of colonial history embedded in the present. Through what could be called a “spectral montage,” scenes of conquest, displacement, and mourning coexist rather than remain buried. How does this ghostly manipulation of the image become a form of epistemic disobedience, resisting the linear, developmental logic that drives capitalist accumulation?
Towards the end of the work, as a preface to a sequence illuminated by rosy flamingoes on a marsh in Bombay, we offer up a Möbius Strip-like conceptual figuration: “the inside is now the outside”. Meaning that the space of capital (the city) has grown to the extent that what was once the edge is now the centre. The voice questions itself, speaks of a “getaway car”, almost as if a question could provide the “getaway car” for its answer. A sonic Möbius strip made up of the twisting of the spoken onto the unspoken: words, and silences between words, dissolving congealed space-time.
Just as the figure of the Möbius strip displaces a linear understanding of space to yield to a more “folded” image, so too, time gets folded in the narrative of the film. This makes it impossible to posit an alien, external future—a consequence of the everlasting deferral produced by the logic of “progress”. This is where what you are referring to as the “epistemic disobedience” that does not assent to the linear, developmental logic that drives capitalist accumulation is located. Instead of complying with this linear logic, the film insists on a contamination of one time by other times. This is done using voices that play with tenses, and by introducing polyphonic timelines that gesture to the simultaneous consideration of different times. This is what turns Rosa Luxemburg and Luxe Sorabgur into contemporaries.
The meandering nature of your work pursues dialectical image juxtaposition. I want to evoke one striking scene: a close-up of a New York Times article on colonial extraction in India that blurs into unreadability, followed by an image of dried leaves. Here, accumulation is not about growth or expansion, but about what remains—affect, ruin, memory, breath, and natural detritus. What kinds of value emerge from this residual, unmeasurable ground—this compost of exhausted light?
The Capital of Accumulation begins with a voice talking about leaves fallen on the forest floor. The voice says, “When I saw you walk the city’s streets, I heard you listen to the voice of fallen leaves on the forest floor.” And then it says, “This too was an accumulation, this heap of leaves, this gathering of open veins, a compost of dreams, exhausted from harvesting the light of a bleak sun.”
This stages the entire work as a collage of acts of reading things that have fallen—leaves, a body, an uprising, an episode in history—and yet, the accumulation of these “things that have fallen” in the course of the accumulation of capital are not seen as detritus, nor the remains that remain in the wake of defeats. Rather, they—like a heap of fallen leaves on forest floors—are compost, fertile and generative. Their impact on time and on the organic growth of life-processes in time, is beyond measure.
That is why, the image of the close-up of a fragment of a page of the New York Times for January 15, 1922 is accompanied by a voice that says: “The New York Times puts trade figures between Germany and India and the curious fate of the thoughts of Rosa Luxemburg on the same page. Sometimes a newspaper can be read like a tarot card.”
This invocation of the act of reading a newspaper—the first draft of history—as if it were a set of tarot cards is an insistence on valuing what can’t be simply quantified. Again, like the heap of leaves, how different events and processes rub up against each other in the same period cannot simply be measured as quantity. They add up to qualities, a compost of dreams.
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Raqs Media Collective (*1992) is composed by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) The word “raqs”, in several languages, denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by being in a state of revolution. Raqs take this sense to mean “kinetic contemplation” and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world and with time. Raqs have shown at Documenta, the Venice, São Paulo, Istanbul, and Sydney Biennales. They have had solo shows at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi; K-21, Düsseldorf; Whitworth Gallery Manchester; MUAC, Mexico City; Mathaf Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and at Proa, Buenos Aires, amongst other locations. They have curated editions of Manifesta, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Yokohama Triennale. Most recently, Raqs were finalists for the design competition for the 22nd July National Memorial in Oslo, Norway.
- Images:
Raqs Media Collective, The Capital of Accumulation (2020), video still. Copyrights and courtesy Raqs Media Collective.
