Surplus Labor, Surplus Desire

This section focuses on a crucial conceptual paradox of Patsey’s surplus labor, the five hundred pounds of cotton she produces, a feat that cannot be emulated by any man. Her surplus labor is linked to a surplus desire. Patsey’s resistance is to be found in “the last place we would have thought of.” Following a line of resistance through Harriet Jacobs, and paraphrasing Katherine McKittrick: “the last place they thought of ” designates an oppositional set of desires caught up in the violent desiring arrangements of the plantation, refracted through the cinematic apparatus. [1] I argue that Patsy hides in the midst of her own figurative violation, in the midst of the violence done to her. She hides in the last place they thought of, in the fold of her own surplus. Her herculean productivity in the labor fields is the sign of a more profound inexhaustible power—a form of labor power—that threatens to escape the frame narration of the film. 

Patsey authorizes a theorization of the gendered relationship between surplus, labor-power, and living labor. Black feminine labor and desire bespeak an unexpected vitality derived from labor-power. Marx formally substituted labor power for labor in the Grundrisse, as the curious commodity that the worker sells the capitalist. Labor power “is not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from [the worker] at all, [it] thus exists not really, but only in potentiality, as [the worker’s] capacity [Fahigkeit].” [2] Significantly, we never see any evidence of Patsey’s labor materialize; the five hundred pounds of cotton becomes a myth of sorts circulated by others on the Epps plantation (fig. 2). According to Marx, the capitalist cannot own the worker’s capacity to work. For Edwin Epps, the five hundred pounds of cotton matters less than Patsey’s mysterious capacity to consistently produce at that rate under his brutal regime. That exorbitant, resistive surplus proffers a promise and a threat that hangs over the Epps plantation. It tortures Edwin Epps in large part because Patsey, a black female slave, falls outside of the worker-capitalist labor relation.

At this point a crucial distinction must be theorized. Marx’s theory depends upon the wage worker’s ownership of her person and this personhood precedes and is reproduced in contractual labor relations. [3] It is time to consider what is made and unmade in the absence of both that contract and the impossibility of the personhood that secures it. Marx would also claim that the wage worker is triply free: free to sell his labor power on the market, free of the ownership of the means of production, and free to starve to death if one wants to forego the capitalist laboring environment. The black female slave’s especially gendered relationship to the means of biological and social reproduction signifies a subversive capacity in the worker, those who own wages and otherwise. Consider W. E. B. Du Bois’s remark that slaves “might be made to work continuously but no power could make them work well.” [4] Apropos Du Bois, we can conclude that for the slave, there is a certain remainder, an irreducible gap, between the slave’s production, and the potentialization of her labor. In the absence of a clearly marked ontological position, the black female slave transgresses the imagined boundary between labor and fugitive performance that hinges on the question of gendered capacity. For Epps, Patsey is nothing other than her capacity. But what Patsey gives and potentially withholds is something more—her capacity for capacity, her fugitive giving and withholding of labor as a prior capacity that effectively cuts the ontological difference between worker and slave. 

To extend Du Bois’s insights here, it is the right of the slave to work and work well as a prior right that prefigures the contractual labor relation. My claim is that this “right” is not dependent upon the contract form per se, but that the contract form is both a measure and an effect of the capitalist’s need to regulate the fugitive reproduction of a form of labor that is itself a performance of productivity. This secret lies with Patsey, whose giving and withholding of that capacity within the space of the indiscernible gap between labor’s production and its performance, transgresses the contractual “right” that informs the ontological impasse between wageworker and slave. Furthermore, her herculean productivity, read as an expression of her performative capacity, is all bound up with her moral inexhaustibility. Her moral appeals to Epps reveals that no wage would be an appropriate compensation for the violent tethering of slave and worker to a capitalist social order set on the destruction of capacity and (the right to) work.

Patsey poses the same problem for Epps as she poses for thought: how does such a surplus capacity persist despite, as Wilderson insists, the slave “being generally dishonored, and perpetually open to gratuitous violence”? [5] Marx also tells us that “If the worker consumes [her] disposable time for [her] self, [s]he robs the capitalist,” [6] who runs up against the worker’s ability, also her inherent right, to reproduce her labor power. Patsey’s demand contains an indictment of Epps that is itself an extension of Marx. Patsey’s reproductive surplus necessarily folds back into black women’s gestational capacities in the context of enslaved reproduction. Moreover, her surplus is not simply subject to violent capture, but throws into relief Epps’s dominant position, which emerges “only through what dominance subordinates through appropriation.” [7] In other words, Epps attempts to subordinate a reproductive surplus that is always already performing a deconstruction of every limit/edge/confinement. The full force of Angela Davis’s assertion that black women performed “the only labor of the slave community which could not be directly and immediately claimed by the oppressor” might be grasped in this context. [8]

Patsey activates a form of what, after Marx, we might call living labor, as the source for her fugitive existence that is already as it were, underway, even in the most brutal work conditions, and under the cinematic gaze that typically sympathizes with that brutality. Living labor is a concept with a future tense; it is not simply a utopian vision for what will follow capitalism, but enacted and fulfilled within the space of the worker-capitalist relation, as I have argued. Patsey’s living labor endures; hers is a living labor that imagines sociality beyond the whipping post, and becomes the condition of possibility for the social reproduction and futurity Solomon Northrop imagines. And so despite the film’s final scenes, which imply that that she has no future as the camera whisks Solomon back to his home in Saratoga and leaves behind a forlorn-looking Patsey, it is her labor power that haunts Solomon’s departure from the plantation and disrupts the narrative closure of the film. For Solomon is fleeing not simply the plantation, but a plantation regime so violent and brutal that, perversely, it confronted the persistence of a form of labor power so grotesquely immeasurable, as the only thing that could withstand it. To think about Patsey’s capacity to endure, imagine, and sustain an image of life on the other side of that violence, poses a challenge to the film’s assumption of the unclaimed kinship that prefigures blackness. 

Notes

[1] Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 44. See also, Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 

[2] This insight is from Martin Nicolaus, “Foreword” in Karl Marx, The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), 21. See also 281, 292, 293, 359. 

[3] Karl Marx, “The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power,” Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 185–97. 

[4] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 40. 

[5] Frank Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 11. 

[6] Marx, Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, 217, 342.

[7] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 262.

[8] Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Massachusetts Review 13 (1972): 87.