Diana Taylor argues that “Capitalism has desecrated matter and destroyed the material supports for human life…We are in the land of the production of death” (10). Through a walking through the performance of Bom Retiro 958 metros by Teatro da Vertigem, Taylor observes how the capitalist system consumes us and then spits us out– as commodity, as consumer, as voyeur, as part of a cyclical process without end, always in a state of transmutation and delirium. In what way does the market, similarly, cannibalize itself, eating its way to record highs, and then being devoured by its own gluttony at its lowest recessions? Through the performance, Taylor comes face to face with the commodified experience of the city and its devastating effects, from the drug trade to labor and female exploitation, creating precarious subjects upon which the system continues to feed itself, and consumers who continue to feed the system, always demanding more and more to eat, driven by a desire to consume.

As I have already noted, the items on the ground that day were vibratory––at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence…Sullivan reminds us [on trash] that a vital materiality can never really be thrown “away,” for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity (Bennett 6).

–brief trigger warning that gendered violence is discussed below–

In this delirious age of neoliberal capitalism and overconsumption, is trash, garbage, the sign of the times? Following Jane Bennett, I argue for garbage as that thing that is both the physical, material afterlife of consumption and, at once, a vehicle of its memory and effects, always fluctuating between states of vibrancy and objecthood. I am specifically thinking of, for example, the garbage landscapes in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, where “scarecrow-like creatures” –the garbage pickers– are seen sifting through the trash, looking for some means of subsistence, a physical manifestation of the erosion of the social safety net in favor of the inequality that stems from capitalist competition: How can this body-with-garbage –that is not only represented in literature but has real-life counterparts all over the world, the garbage pickers in the basureros of Mexico serving only as one example– also serve as a representation of “the culmination, the consummation of people melded with things” (Taylor 16)? Or, continuing with 2666, how the body –here the body of the female laborer– appears-as-garbage, disposed of in vacant lots and garbage cans in the enumeration of feminicidos around the site of the maquiladora, the place of production that is now intimately tied to consumption through a deadly gendered violence.

What I am thinking about here is how the concept of dead capital forces us to consider the interrelation between eating, consumption, material, and death.

Brief note: The other topic I had wanted to discuss but am not able to fit into this post are questions of ambivalence and tactics of mimicry as they relate to “The Cannibalist Manifesto.” Having just read Homi Bhabha in another class, I wonder if we can relate the statements of, for example, “We were never catechised…We brought about the birth of Christ in Bahia” to Bhabha’s recollection of Anund Messeh’s encounter under a tree outside Delhi. Perhaps something we can discuss in class.